Quotes F-K

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again--which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before. - Letter to W. D. Howells, January 25, 1900
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.

Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass.- "A Salutation from the 19th to the 20th Century," December 31, 1900

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more that one cigar at a time.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

I make it a rule never to smoke while I'm sleeping.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

I've never let my school interfere with my education.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.


If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

It's good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.