The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food
for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
From MINNEAPOLIS
TRIBUNE, February 14, 1901.
Bottom caption: "Better quit your foolin', Mark, and go back and work at
your trade."
An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.
- A Tramp Abroad
The new political gospel: public office is private graft.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
|
"Moralist
in disguise" |
Yes, you are right--I am a moralist in
disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in
political questions. - Letter to Helene Picard, Feb. 22, 1902 |
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every
case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have
not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand
from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
...one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar
agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of pumpkins in -- however,
the Territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum".
- Roughing It
|
...when you are in politics you are in a wasp's nest with a short shirt-tail,
as the saying is. I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion
and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's. |
 |
When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in
the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to
accept and believe the impossible...
- Letter to Jules Hart, 12/17/1901
[In the Galaxy Magazine]: I shall not often meddle with politics, because
we have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve
a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government
and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
From MINNEAPOLIS
TRIBUNE, March 20, 1901
Look at the tyranny of party--at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty--a
snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes--and which turns voters
into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves
are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom
of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting
or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies
a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave,
beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing
the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.
- "The Character of Man," Mark Twain's Autobiography
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