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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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JOURNALISM

journalism graphic

Now that is the way to write--peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.
- "Journalism in Tennessee"

Journalism is the one solitary respectable profession which honors theft (when committed in the pecuniary interest of a journal,) & admires the thief....However, these same journals combat despicable crimes quite valiantly--when committed in other quarters.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, October 30, 1880

Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a foot race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave.
- "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper"

THE MAKING OF A JOURNALIST

Henry H. Ashton, a Virginia City capitalist, has in his library richly bound in crushed Levant, those early volumes of the Virginia City Enterprise, to which Mark Twain contributed.

The faded pages contain innumerable specimens of the famous writer's quaint humor. Mr. Ashton often points out the first paragraph that Mark Twain wrote on his arrival in Virginia City. The paragraph runs:

"A thunderstorm made Beranger a poet, a mother's kiss made Benjamin West a painter and a salary of $15 a week makes us a journalist."
- Dallas Morning News, November 17, 1907, p. 4. (I am indebted to Michael Marleau for bringing this item to my attention.)


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