Question: Was Mark Twain born in Florida or Missouri?Answer: Both. He was born in Florida, Missouri.
Sometime in the past two years I discovered Wikiquote. It's a great way to get acquainted with authors and famous people by things they have written or said. I've done a number of blog posts that were borderline listicles with a little information about someone and quotes that illuminate more of their ideas, etc. A few examples include Thomas Sowell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and James Baldwin.
So without further adieu, a batch of quotes from one of the pithiest author/orators of the late 19th century.
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"I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever."
"An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar."
"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
"I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself."
"Definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
"To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology."
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
"Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."
"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
"It may be called the Master Passion—the hunger for Self-Approval.
"France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.
"Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned."
"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform."
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William Faulkner was apparently not impressed with Twain. He described Twain as a "hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy."
Ernest Hemingway seemed to have a different take when he wrote "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." .
Finally, in a letter to Twain near the end of his life, George Bernard Shaw offered this assessment: "I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire."
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