Mark Twain Quotes on People (29 Quotes)

Then the old man got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he could think of, and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped any, and after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all round, including a considerable parcel of people which he didn't know the names of, and so called them what's-his-name, when he got to them, and went right along with his cussing.

People talk about beautiful relationships between two persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort as compared with the friendship of man and wife where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same? There is no place for comparison between the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.

Wherefore, I beseech you let the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless names work out their several salvations from their piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for indeed their trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an I tried to help I should but damage their cause the more and yet mayhap not live myself to see the desolation wrought.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

All say, 'How hard it is that we have to die' - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.

Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.

Most people are bothered by scripture they don't understand, but what bothers me are those I do understand.

People born to be hanged are safe in water.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

There is a good side and a bad side to most people, and in accordance with your own character and disposition you will bring out one of them and the other will remain a sealed book to you

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.

Never do wrong when people are looking.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

We ought never to do wrong when people are looking.

If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people.

When red-haired people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kind of people

I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press

There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for ''political influence.'' We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. ''Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny''