Rachel Wheeler-McAnally’s Reviews > Mark Twain > Status Update

“Man is the only slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves.”

On the treatment of the Aborigines:
“It is robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man’s whiskey… there are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

Mark Twain on his world tour and subsequent book.

“I wrote my last travel-book in Hell, but I let on, the best I could, that it was a journey through heaven… How I did loathe that journey around the world! Except the sea-part & India.”

“There is one little point I must not forget to mention, which is that my first audience was - in a penitentiary. But there the comparison ends. For while those men are expiating their crimes, the gentlemen in front of me have not even commenced to repent for theirs.”

When visiting a friend’s husband who was on the side of the British during the Boer Wars and was a prisoner:

John Hays Hammond: “Mr Clemens, I’m certainly glad to see you again. How did you ever find your way into this God-forsaken hole?”

Mark Twain: “Getting into jail is easy. I thought the difficulties arose when it came to getting out.”

Mark Twain on doctors:
“They always cure the disease they are dealing with - and leave you with another.”

Mark Twain on his travels through India:
“Everything is on a giant scale- even her poverty; no other country can show anything to compare with it.”

Mark Twain’s wife’s opinion when he renounced profanity for a bit, when he fell off the wagon when a tumbler in his hand broken during a bumpy ship passage, “don’t reform any more, it’s not an improvement.” 😂😂

Mark Twain’s opinion on the French is pretty much summed up by this:
“Write a ‘French’ novel - 37 cases of adultery, & they all live happy to the end.”

Tom Sawyer Abroad where Presbyterian Uncle Abner notes the shortage of saints by saying “heaven was the Rhode Island of the Hereafter.” 🤣🤣🤣