Mark Twain

"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may."

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

"Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid."

"You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there."

"In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."

"Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation."

"I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty."

"The best of all lost arts is honesty."

"Work is a necessary evil to be avoided."

"Ah, heavens and earth, friend, if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor that you could to-day."

"In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language."

"But that is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel."