Following the Equator Quotes

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“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, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Be good and you will be lonesome.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Names are not always what they seem.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“The Whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted white man can always be depended on to prove himself inadequate when he deals with savages. He cannot turn the situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a well-meaning savage transfer him from his house and his church and his clothes and his books and his choice food to a hideous wilderness of sand and rocks and snow, and ice and sleet and storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no bed, no covering for his and his family's naked bodies, and nothing to eat but snakes and grubs and offal. This would be a hell to him; and if he had any wisdom he would know that his own civilization is a hell to the savage - but he hasn't any, and has never had any; and for lack of it he shut up those poor natives in the unimaginable perdition of his civilization, committing his crime with the very best intentions, and saw those poor creatures waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it, vaguely troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter with them.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“The timid man yearns for full value and asks for a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays

“These descriptions do really state the truth- as nearly as the limitations of language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts-by help of the readers imagination, which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“In both instances [a car coming out of the Himalayas and tobogganning] the sensation was pleasurable--intensely so; it was a sudden and immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable joy. I believe that this combination makes the perfection of human delight.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays

“It is ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked like something else.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.—[See”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“Australasian's custom of speaking of England as "home." It was always pretty to hear it, and often it was said in an unconsciously caressing way that made it touching; in a way which transmuted a sentiment into an embodiment, and made one seem to see Australasia as a young girl stroking mother England's old gray head.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“The average human being is a perverse creature; and when he isn't that, he is a practical joker.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“One is often surprised at the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“We all know about Father Damien, the French priest who voluntarily forsook the world and went to the leper island of Molokai to labor among its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming misery, for death to come and release them from their troubles;”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“There is no such thing as "the Queen's English." The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“Without doubt modesty is nothing less than a holy feeling;”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“robbery by European nations of each other's territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day. To the several cabinets the several political establishments of the world are clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth—including America, of course—consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and re-stolen 500 times. The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other. In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen several millions of times. A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere. In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the original wash left dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash. She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along the northern boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. It is England's prospective property, and Russia knows it; but Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy. Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid for it. And now straightway they are beginning the old game again—to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast slice of Central Africa with the English flag and the English missionary and the English trader scattered all over it, but with certain formalities neglected—no signs up, "Keep off the grass," "Trespassers-forbidden," etc.—and she stepped in with a cold calm smile and put up the signs herself, and swept those English pioneers promptly out of the country. There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the form of a maxim: Get your formalities right—never mind about the moralities. It was an impudent thing; but England had to put up with it. Now, in the case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago. England should have snatched Madagascar from the French clothes-line. Without an effort she could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is too late. The signs of the times show plainly enough what is going to happen. All the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to the Christian governments of Europe. I am”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“They are fine marksmen, the Boers. From the cradle up, they live on horseback and hunt wild animals with the rifle. They have a passion for liberty and the Bible, and care for nothing else.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“it contains no copy of the Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing. A singular book. Not a sincere line in it, and not a character that invites respect; a book which is one long waste-pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a book which is full of pathos which revolts, and humor which grieves the heart. There are few things in literature that are more piteous, more pathetic, than the celebrated "humorous" incident of Moses and the spectacles.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“The captain has been telling how, in one of his Arctic voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and had to be ripped loose by main strength. And even then he got only about two-thirds of it back.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“April 10. The sea is a Mediterranean blue; and I believe that that is about the divinest color known to nature.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator