Khari’s Reviews > The Autobiography of Mark Twain > Status Update

"... And whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there, which will be soon, let us hope and trust."

I don't think he pulled his punches. I don't think he suffered from any moral relativism here. He clearly had the ability and the moral strength to speak out against what he thought was wrong.

"...of this planet for the past 1000 years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives within the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy piety-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster, whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere..."

"...poor natives in the Congo every year, and does it by the silent consent of all the christian powers except England, none of them lifting a hand or a voice to stop these atrocities, although thirteen of them are by solemn treaty pledged to the protecting and uplifting of those wretched natives. In fourteen years Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields...

People seem to think that only modern day people understand how bad things were historically, they're wrong.

This is Mark Twain speaking contemporaneously about king Leopold of Belgium and what he did in the Congo.
"The royal palace of Belgium is still what has been for 14 years.The den of a wild beast, king Leopold II, who for money's sake, mutilates, murders and starves half a million of friendless and helpless...

You may try a dozen wrong forms, but in each case you will not get very far before you discover that you have not found the right one -then that story will always stop and decline to go any further.

This one's gonna be a long one:

"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand the ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written-it is only because the right form for the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself....

We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that the standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities which we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are the men who do things which we recognize with regret and sometimes with a secret shame that we cannot do.

"A sensible human once said 'If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit;' and again, 'She's the sort of woman who lives for others-you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.'"