|
Man has been called the laughing animal to distinguish him from the others--but
the monkey laughts; & he has been called the animal that weeps--but
several of the others do that. Man is merely & exclusively the Immodest
Animal, for he is the only one that covers his nakedness, the only one
with a soiled mnd, the only one under the dominion of a false shame.
- Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
- "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar"
The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and
the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly
Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
All I care to know is that a man is a human being--that
is enough for me; he can't be any worse. I can get right down and grovel
with him.
- Mark Twain's notebook #42
I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because
he was disappointed in the monkey. I believe that whenever a human being,
of even the highest intelligence and culture, delivers, an opinion upon
a matter apart from his particular and especial line of interest, training
and experience, it will always be an opinion so foolish and so valueless
a sort that it can be depended upon to suggest to our Heavenly Father
that the human being is another disappointment and that he is no considerable
improvement upon the monkey.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)
In discarding the monkey and substituting man, our Father in Heaven did
the monkey an undeserved injustice.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
- More Maxims of Mark, edited by Merle Johnson, 1927
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 a man.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson
Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his
party did not miss the boat.
- Christian Science
There are three kinds of people--Commonplace Men, Remarkable Men, and
Lunatics.
- Following the Equator
Oh, this infernal Human Race! I wish I had it in the Ark again--with an
auger!
- undated letter to Joseph Twichell, reprinted in The American Academy
of Arts and Letters pamphlet, "In Memory of Samuel Langhorne
Clemens"
I am the only man living who understands human nature; God has put me
in charge of this branch office; when I retire there will be no-one to
take my place. I shall keep on doing my duty, for when I get over on the
other side, I shall use my influence to have the human race drowned again,
and this time drowned good, no omissions, no Ark.
- quoted in "Mark Twain," Spirit of American Literature,
John A. Macy, (1913)
Man was made at the end of the week's work, when God was tired.
- Notebook, 1903; Mark Twain, a Biography
Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the
only animal that has the True Religion-- several of them.
- "The Lowest Animal," 1897
I think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of
some vast creature's veins and it is the vast creature that God concerns
himself about and not us.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
[Twichell] ... sends me a vast newspaper heading, the breadth
of five columns 'Close of a Great Career' in which it is said that I am
living in penury in London and that my family has forsaken me. This would
enrage and disgust me if it came from a dog or a cow, or an elephant or
any of the higher animals, but it comes from a man, and much allowance
must be made for man.
- Notebook, 28 March 1897
To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was
tautology.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903
We are nothing but echoes. We have no thoughts of or own, no opinions
of our own, we are but a compost heap made up of the decayed heredities,
moral and physical.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers
hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1898
We're nothing but a ragbag of disappeared ancestors.
- quoted in Isabel Lyon's journal, 3 February 1906
Why, he's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit
this earth. He has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged
and upholstered to be able to live at all. He is a rickety sort of a thing,
anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities.
He is always undergoing repair...He has just that one stupendous superiority--his
imagination, his intellect.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
The government is not best which secures mere life and property--there
is a more valuable thing--manhood.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
Man was created a bloody animal and I think he will always thirst for
blood and will manage to have it. I think he is far and away the worst
animal that exists; and the only untamable one.
- quoted in My Father Mark Twain, Clara Clemens
If man had created man he would be ashamed of his performance.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903
He equips the Creator with every trait that goes to the making of a fiend,
and then arrives at the conclusion that a fiend and a father are the same
thing! Yet he would deny that a malevolent lunatic and a Sunday school
superintendent are essentially the same. What do you think of the human
mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.
- Letters from the Earth
Isn't human nature the most consummate sham & lie that was ever invented?
Isn't man a creature to be ashamed of in pretty much all is aspects? Is
he really fit for anything but to be stood up on the street corner as
a convenience for dogs? Man, "Know thyself--& then thou wilt
despise thyself, to a dead moral certainty.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 31 August 1884
I suspect that to you there is still dignity in human life, & that
Man is not a joke--a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived--an
April-fool joke, played by a malicious Creator with nothing better to
waste his time upon. ...Man is not to me the respect-worthy person he
was before; & so I have lost my pride in him & can't write gaily
nor praisefully about him any more. And I don't intend to try.
- Letter to William Dean Howells Howells, 2 April 1899
Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to
prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for.
I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the
world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would
represent man's share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that
skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno.
- "Was the World Made for Man?"
I believe that many a person has examined man with a microscope
in every age of the world; has found that he did not even resemble the
creature he pretended to be; has perceived that a civilization not proper
matter for derision has always been and must always remain impossible
to him -- and has put away his microscope and kept his mouth shut. Perhaps
because the microscopist (besides having an influential wife) was built
like the rest of the human race -- ninety-nine parts of him being moral
cowardice.
- Letter to Carl Thalbitzer, 26 November 1902. Reprinted in Harper's
Magazine, December 2009.
|
