Truth & Lies
20 quotes
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
“The truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.”
“Whenever you are in doubt about what to do, just tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
“I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.”
“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”
“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
“The man who tells the truth is never believed.”
“When in doubt, tell the truth.”
“In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.”
“No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.”
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
“The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.”
“Most people are bothered by those passages in Scripture which they cannot understand; but as for me, I always notice that the passages in Scripture which trouble me most are those which I do understand.”
“The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.”
“A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.”
Education & Learning
27 quotes
“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.”
“College ain’t for everyone, and it wasn’t for me, but libraries? Now those are for anyone.”
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book... which told its mind to me without reserve.”
“Don’t explain your author: it isn’t nice to speak ill of the dead.”
“A classic is a book which people praise and don’t read.”
“No man was ever great who had not a great mother—it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Lincoln’s mother, in death, did more for him than she could have done in life.”
“The man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”
“A man should never neglect his family for business—or for school, if he can help it.”
“Everything has its limit—even education.”
“The best minds are not always found in the best schools. They’re often too busy learning elsewhere.”
“Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.”
“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”
“The educated man is not the man who can answer the questions, but the man who can ask them.”
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
“What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.”
“We have the best government that money can buy.”
“I never let schooling interfere with my education.”
“I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.”
“Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”
“The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.”
“I don’t believe in colleges but I do believe in libraries.”
“It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”
“The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
“Out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation.”
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
“When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.”
Human Nature
28 quotes
“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”
“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”
“The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.”
“Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.”
“The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven.”
“The average American is a good-hearted, fair-minded, generous, hospitable, and honest person.”
“Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.”
“We are all alike, on the inside.”
“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
“Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”
“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.”
“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”
“It is easier to stay out than get out.”
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
“All men are liars; all women are liars too. Just not at the same time.”
“The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s.”
“We are all fools in turn.”
“Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.”
“Be good and you will be lonesome.”
“I can live for two months on a good compliment.”
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
“Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.”
“There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one: keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.”
“The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.”
“Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
“The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.”
“Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.”
Politics & Society
20 quotes
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
“Lincoln is the only example in history of a man who rose from the lowest ranks of life to the highest without the aid of crime or politics.”
“If Lincoln had told fewer jokes and made more laws, we’d admire him less—but we’d probably be worse off for it.”
“The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.”
“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.”
“No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
“A statesman is an easy man to make. He only requires a good memory, a bad heart, and a grudge against his kind.”
“All kings is mostly rapscallions.”
“The citizen who sees his society moving toward injustice has a duty to resist it.”
“In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.”
“Nothing is so ignorant as a man’s vote when he has not heard both sides.”
“The government is merely a servant—merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”
“The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.”
“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.”
“Laws control the lesser man... Right conduct controls the greater one.”
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
“The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.”
“The two most interesting characters of the 19th century are Napoleon and Helen Keller.”
“General (Ulysses S.) Grant’s book is a great, unique, and unapproachable literary masterpiece… He was a man who did not say the right thing—he did the right thing.”
Religion & Philosophy
23 quotes
“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
“Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them.”
“A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and turned out for what he knows.”
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
“Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”
“Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.”
“The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
“If there is no God, nothing matters. If there is a God, everything matters.”
“I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious—except he deliberately shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.”
“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”
“I am not interested to know whether man descended from the ape; I am interested to know whether he has descended from the ape.”
“If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.”
“I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell—you see, I have friends in both places.”
“It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
“The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.”
“Conscience takes up more room than all the rest of a fellow’s insides.”
“The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
“You can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into.”
“The church is always trying to get other people to reform. It might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.”
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”
“The kingdom of Heaven is for those who are poor in spirit, but the taxman prefers those who are rich in gold.”
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Humor & Writing
28 quotes
“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
“Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.”
“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.”
“I impersonated Lincoln once. I put on a stovepipe hat and stood in thought. The audience wept. Mostly from laughter.”
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
“When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable.”
“Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.”
“I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.”
“The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.”
“Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”
“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”
“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”
“Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well.”
“To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.”
“Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.”
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.”
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
“The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”
“When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.”
“Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life.”
Life & Death
26 quotes
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
“Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
“Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.”
“I was born modest. Not all over, but in spots.”
“Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.”
“It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.”
“Life is short. Break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile.”
“All generalizations are false, including this one.”
“The lack of money is the root of all evil.”
“Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.”
“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“You can’t reach old age by another man’s road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you.”
“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
“The average man doesn’t like trouble and danger. That is why he is average.”
“When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear... Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”
“Honesty is the best policy—when there is money in it.”
“Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
“Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat.”
“Let your sympathies and your compassion be always with the underdog in the fight—this is magnanimity; it is not the seed of heroism, but it is the root of it.”
“Oh Death where is thy sting! It has none. But life has.”
“The heart is the real fountain of youth.”
“You can’t make a life over. Society wouldn’t let you if you tried.”
“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.”
Travel & the World
35 quotes
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
“I have found out there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.”
“The holy places of the earth are not merely cities or shrines but wherever men walk with open eyes and unclouded hearts.”
“Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.”
“We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries so we can show off and astonish people when we get home.”
“Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven and hell.”
“The mildest, drowsiest man in the world cannot sit down in a first-class railway carriage and travel sixty miles without becoming a quarrelsome lunatic.”
“It liberates the vandal to travel—you never saw a big man who wasn’t more or less vandal at heart.”
“Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.”
“All that is in the world is worth having, it may be all possessed and yet all left behind.”
“I would rather feel bad in Idaho than feel good anywhere else.”
“With all their faults, I love the distance between countries.”
“There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.”
“Broad as are the deserts of our knowledge, and narrow as are the conventional paths of travel through them.”
“A man who speaks two languages is worth two men, and one who travels in two worlds is worth much more.”
“I was not a young man born to learn, yet travel taught me more than books ever could.”
“The road is life’s grandest teacher, showing us ourselves in every turn.”
“To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else—these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.”
“If I see a truth in a foreign city, I take it home as my own.”
“Curiosity propelled me farther than fear ever could.”
“There is something divine in plain living and high thinking on the road.”
“In America, we hurry—which is well; but when the day’s work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us.”
“It is curious—the space-annihilating power of thought.”
“Travel binds us to strangers and separates us from ignorance.”
“A journey is the journey of the mind as well as the body.”
“Nothing is so beautiful as the art of traveling far and returning home wiser.”
“You find your best friend in a traveler, for he understands the wonder of the unknown.”
“One gets large impressions in boyhood, sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life.”
“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”
“India has two million gods, and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.”
“Take the universe as a whole, and it is a very clever conception and quite competently carried out, but I don’t think much of this globe as a work of art.”
“If travel kills prejudice, it also pins wisdom like a medal on your sleeve.”
“In our day we don’t allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel.”
Freedom & Independence
24 quotes
“Independence is loyalty to one’s best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.”
“Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
“The quality of independence was almost wholly left out of the human race.”
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
“The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice—and always has been.”
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
“Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”
“Independence is loyalty to one’s own convictions, even when they differ from every voice in the room.”
“Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.”
“Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.”
“That’s the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don’t care, individuals do.”
“We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.”
“The government is not best which secures mere life and property—there is a more valuable thing—manhood.”
“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”
“Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.”
“To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.”
“We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.”
“The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
“Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.”
“We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one—the one we use—which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy.”
“It’s my opinion that everyone I know has morals, though I wouldn’t like to ask. But I’d rather teach them than practice them any day.”
“If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
“The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.”
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