 Caricature of Mark Twain from PENSACOLA (FL) JOURNAL, May 28, 1905 |
...one of the worst things about civilization is, that anybody that gits
a letter with trouble in it comes and tells you all about it and makes
you feel bad, and the newspapers fetches you the troubles of everybody
all over the world, and keeps you downhearted and dismal most all the
time, and it's such a heavy load for a person. There is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels
when he is for the first time pilloried in print. |
|
A private should preserve a respectful attitude toward his superiors,
and should seldom or never proceed so far as to offer suggestions to his
general in the field. By the etiquette of war, it is permitted to none
below the rank of newspaper correspondent to dictate to the general in
the field. I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion
of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when
they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe
is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the
thunders of prophecy. |
 Composite graphic courtesy of Dave Thomson |
I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be
good so that God will not make me one.
- Galaxy
magazine, December 1870
We are also told that our newspapers are irreverent, coarse, vulgar, and ribald.
I hope that this irreverence will last for ever; that we shall always show irreverence
for royalties and titled creatures born into privilege, and all that class which
take their title from anything but merit.
- Interview, "Mark Twain and His Book," Pall Mall Gazette (London),
23 December 1889.
 |
It seems to me that just in the ratio that our newspapers increase, our
morals decay. The more newspapers the worse morals. Where we have one
newspaper that does good, I think we have fifty that do harm. We ought
to look upon the establishment of a newspaper of the average pattern in
a virtuous village as a calamity. |
The old saw says, "Let sleeping dogs lie." Right. Still when there
is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.
- Following the Equator
...news is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form,
and...history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in
a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle
in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people -- who constitute the
grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations -- do believe and
are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is
where the harm lies.
- "License of the Press," speech, 31 March 1873
Unassailable certainty is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most
valuable reputation.
- Roughing It
Our papers have one peculiarity -- it is American -- their irreverence . . .
They are irreverent toward pretty much everything, but where they laugh one
good king to death, they laugh a thousand cruel and infamous shams and superstitions
into the grave, and the account is squared. Irreverence is the champion of liberty
and its only sure defense.
-Mark Twain's Notebook
Necessarily we are all fond of murders, scandals, swindles, robberies, explosions,
collisions, and all such things, when we know the people, and when they are
neighbors and friends, but when they are strangers we do not get any great pleasure
out of them, as a rule. Now the trouble with an American paper is that it has
no discrimination; it rakes the whole earth for blood and garbage, and the result
is that you are daily overfed and suffer a surfeit. By habit you stow this much
every day, but you come by and by to take no vital interest in it -- indeed,
you almost get tired of it. As a rule, forty-nine-fiftieths of it concerns strangers
only -- people away off yonder, a thousand miles, two miles, ten thousand miles
from where you are. Why, when you come to think of it, who cares what becomes
of those people? I would not give the assassination of one personal friend for
a whole massacre of those others. And to my mind, one relative or neighbor mixed
up in a scandal is more interesting than a whole Sodom and Gomorrah of outlanders
gone rotten. Give me the home product every time.
- "Italian Without a Master"
Also see: Libel
Quotations | Newspaper Articles | Special Features | Links | Search