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BTW Twain said..


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Posted

I had to look to see if you were quoting Mark or Shania Twain. I like them both.

My favourite Shania Twain quote is: "That don't impress me much."

Isaiah 32:17 And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever.

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Posted

Mark Twain on the Human Race--

Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity; He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly--a lark which must have cost him a regret or two when He came to think it over & observe effects.

- Letter to William Dean Howells, 25 January 1900

As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it--it is like hitting a child.

- Autobiographical dictation, 25 June 1906 (reprinted in Hudson Review, Autumn 1963)

There isn't any way to libel the human race.

- Mark Twain in Eruption

Etiquette requires us to admire the human race.

- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason.

- marginalia written in Clemens's copy of Charles Greville's The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV. The note is written near Greville's criticism of Lord Byron.

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

- Christian Science

The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.

- Notebook, 1898

The human race consists of the dangerously insane and such as are not.

- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?

- "The Czar's Soliloquy"

The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it.

- Mark Twain, a Biography

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning--knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

- Letter to William Dean Howells, 2 April 1899

Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.

- Letter to William Dean Howells, 1899

We all belong to the nasty stinking little human race, & of course it is not nice for God's beloved vermin to scoff at each other... Oh, we are a nasty little lot--& to think there are people who would like to save us & continue us. It won't happen if I have any influence.

- - Letter to William Dean Howells, 2 April 1899

In a book by Charles Darwin, Mark Twain had written: "Can any plausible excuse be furnished for the crime of creating the human race?"

- The New York Times, "Hartford Museum Purchases Barrels Full of Twain's Old Books," July 31, 1997

I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented -- which is another riddle which tires me.

- Letter to Henry H. Rogers, 24 September 1894

John 3:16-17

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. [17] For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

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Posted

Mark Twain on God:

If God is what people say, there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, "As unhappy as God."

- Notebook #24, April - Aug. 1885

God puts something good and loveable in every man His hands create.

- The American Vandal speech, 1868

...being made merely in the image of God, but not otherwise resembling him enough to be mistaken by anybody but a very near-sighted person.

- Letter to sister Pamela, quoted in The Love Letters of Mark Twain (undated)

No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God--primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.

- Mark Twain, a Biography

...a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!

- No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.

- Notebook, 1898

Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million.

- Mark Twain

More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent.

- letter to Clara Clemens, quoted in My Husband Gabrilowitsch)

...the swindle of life and the treachery of a God that can create disease and misery and crime--create things that men would be condemned for creating--that men would be ashamed to create.

- quoted in Isabel Lyon's Journal, 2/2/1906

God pours out love upon all with a lavish hand -- but He reserves vengeance for His very own.

- Mark Twain's Notebook

It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden

- Mark Twain's Autobiography

We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision true--humor.

- Notebook, 1902

God's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

- Notebook, 1898

What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything.

- Notebook, 1898

None of us can be as great as God, but any of us can be as good.

- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

All gods are better than their conduct.

- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.

- Notebook, 1904

The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shielf it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God's treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them. Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind.

- Letters from the Earth

John 3:16-17

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. [17] For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

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Posted

I think you is correct dgrimm, and there are many more.

pk

phkrause

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan. Proverbs 29;2
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Posted

Yes, he did have a poor understanding of God. He unfortunately reached the point where he despised both the human race AND God.

John 3:16-17

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. [17] For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

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