"We don't care to eat toadstools that..." - Quote by Mark Twain

“I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.”

“Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.”

“Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.”

“A wise man can play the part of a clown, but a clown can't play the part of a wise man.”

“Behind every smile there's teeth.”

“An inebriated elderly gentleman in the last depths of shabbiness... played the calm and virtuous old men.”

“To dye oneself with paints in order to have a rosier or a paler complexion is a lying counterfeit.”

“Men who marry for gratification, propagation or the matter of buttons or socks, must expect to cope with and deal in a certain amount of quibble, subterfuge, concealments, and double, deep-dyed prevarication.”

“In the first place, then, men should guard against the beginning of change, and in the second place they should not rely upon the political devices of which I have already spoken invented only to deceive the people, for they are proved by experience to be useless.”