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

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MALICE

There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

AI image created by Barbara Schmidt

Malice and malignity faded out of me--or maybe I drove them out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool who wrote it.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 28 January 1882

Of all the creatures [man]...is the only one--the solitary one--that possesses malice....He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain...all creatures kill...man is the only one...that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge.
- "The Character of Man" in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010)

Also see Cruelty

Portrait
Portrait from the Dave Thomson collection


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