He arrived on a comet's tail, and left the same way, having dwelt among us for a lifetime shining a light in our faces. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, humorist, satirist, lecturer... and one of America's greatest writers, better known as the incomparable Mark Twain. What follows are a number of pithy Twain quotes and notes for our mutual pleasure.
"Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed."
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.""I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey."
"Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething."
"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits."
"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.""Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."
"What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense."
"To be witty in France is very simple -- one merely needs to be dirty."
"Truth is stranger than Fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
2 comments:
Have you ever told Dad the one about school boards? I owe him an email. I'll have to remember to put that in.
(Yet ... I remember Dad going fishing with the Superintendent of Hermantown School District, and the "Soop" plus other Hermantown School Board members having been at our place, for one reason or another. That was back in the '60's, when there was still a thriving middle class in the US, and school superintendents still had time to socialize with school bus drivers.)
I liked that quote, too, because ever since we moved to Duluth the school board has been a source of perpetual conflict here. Population change impacts all communities, I suppose, and thus classroom size, new buildings, elimination of facilities are repeatedly addressed, but this town/city (Duluth) adds the dimension of East, Central and West loyalties to the mix with a measure of social class attributes, memories and a mish mash of other variables that precede or evade my understanding. What I know is that school board conflict is as dependable as the next cold winter.
>>>Have you ever told Dad the one about school boards?<<<
I will let you enjoy that guilty pleasure.
Duluth's other ongoing political battleground that pre-occupied local legislators was finally resolved when the City Council approved Bob Dylan Way... a twenty year battle that culminated in a solution that cost taxpayers nothing, zip, nada.
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