Posted on 04/15/2025 1:21:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
"We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet today. Our president stands for us like a colossal monument."
I have often wondered at the condition of things which set aside morality in politics and make possible the election of men whose unfitness is apparent. We have never had a president before who was destitute of self-respect & of respect for his high office; we have had no president before who was not a gentleman; we have had no president before who was intended for a butcher, a dive keeper or a bully, and missed his mission by compulsion of circumstances over which he had no control.
We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet today, and our president stands for us like a colossal monument visible from all the ends of the earth. He is fearfully hard and coarse where another gentleman would exhibit kindliness and delicacy.
He became so expert in duplicity, and so admirably plausible that he couldn’t tell himself when he was lying and when he wasn’t. The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might.
He taught them that the only true freedom of thought is to think as the party thinks; that the only true freedom of speech is to speak as the party dictates; that the only righteous toleration is toleration of what the party approves; that patriotism, duty, citizenship, and devotion to country, loyalty to the flag, are all summed up in loyalty to party. Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being “loyal” to a thousand iniquities.
It is interesting, wonderfully interesting — the miracles which party-politics can do with a man’s mental and moral make-up. In the interest of party expediency they give solemn pledges, they make solemn compact; in the interest of party expediency, they repudiate them without a blush. They would not dream of committing these strange crimes in private life.
It is an accepted law of public life that in it, a man may soil his honor in the interest of party expediency — must do it when the party requires it. Where the party leads, they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals. Here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it & out of place — the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge. We will not hire a school-teacher who does not know the alphabet. We will not have a man about us in our business life, in any walk of it, low or high, unless he has served an apprenticeship and can prove that he is capable of doing the work he offers to do. We even require a plumber to know something about his business, that he shall at least know which side of a pipe is the inside. But when a representative of ours learns, after long experience, how to conduct the affairs of his office, we discharge him and hire somebody that doesn’t know anything about it.
Those burglars that broke into my house recently are in jail, and if they keep on, they will go to Congress. When a person starts downhill, you could never tell where he’s going to stop.
People seem to think they are citizens of the Republican Party and that that is patriotism and sufficiently good patriotism. I prefer to be a citizen of the United States.
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death.
In this country we have one great privilege which they don’t have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That’s the finest asset we’ve got — the ballot box.
In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t.The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.
The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
A short reply to the silly journalism major that wrote that article: Bubba Clinton, Dorkbama, the Muslim eunuch quota and...the Biden Crime Family. None have had a real job. Non could run a business, and none have the creativity to wire a light bulb given wire, battery, and the bulb.
Of which president was Mark Twain writing? Or is the SF Chronicle trying to make a point?
None have the creativity to wire a light bulb given wire, battery, and the bulb.
Indeed it’s why they ended up in journalism wing it as they go along.
They believe opinions are allowed to be sold as facts.
It’s just a collection of disconnected scraps of Twain’s work. From the end of the Chronicle article:
Every word of the text printed above was written by Mark Twain in novels, speeches, autobiographical dictations, interviews, letters, posthumously published notebooks, manuscripts and other sources dating from the 1860s through the 1910s.
I don’t know if he was writing about someone specific, but when he died Taft was president, so no one after that.
I like the one: If you don’t read the newspapers you are uninformed; if you do read the news papers you are ill-informed.
And the lefties still don’t get why Donald Trump won big time last November.
This country was blessed having Mark Twain and Will Rogers and their common sense as citizens. We’ve never been that lucky again....
George Carlin wasn’t bad. But no Mark Twain.
Quote: “in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.”
Exactly.
And we collectively have chosen that we have had enough of your SF values, your homo, crap on the sidewalks, feminist, baby killing, globalist, mask wearing, wind turbine hugging, stupidity.
Did you know?
Mark Twain means 12 feet.
He adopted the pen name in early 1863 when he was a newspaperman in Nevada. It referred to his steamboating days, when the measure of the depth of the water was expressed with a crewman’s cry “mark twain!,” meaning two fathoms, or 12 feet.
From Murdoch Mysteries
A person who held himself in high esteem he presumed to pass judgment on everyone and everything including the universe and God Himself. Of course, he never did anything about the things he decried besides flap his yap.
He wrote nicely but asking authors of fiction their thoughts on anything will rarely result in anything of value as reality is not their strong suit.
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