twain eye openers

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it -- it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again.
- Mark Twain, a Biography 

...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.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court 

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 reader's imagination, which is always ready to take a hand and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that.
- Following the Equator  

As for myself, I have no difficulty in believing that our newspapers will by & by contain news, not 24 hours old from Jupiter et al- mainly astronomical corrections & weather indications; with now & then a sarcastic fling at the only true religion.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 10/15/1881