Quote

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.

Mark Twain

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Twain
Age: 74 †
Born: 1835
Born: November 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 21
Aphorist
Author
Autobiographer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Teacher
Florida
Missouri
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel L. Clemens
Samuel Clemens
Funny
Tradition
Persevered
Crime
Ceases
Form
Humor
Custom
Thousand
Customs
Becomes
Centuries
Century
Criminals
Virtue
Cease
Law
Forms
Supersedes

More quotes by Mark Twain

Image
Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.
Mark Twain
Image
when we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.
Mark Twain
Image
Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.
Mark Twain
Image
Etiquette requires us to admire the human race.
Mark Twain
Image
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
Image
The convention missionaries call modesty has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice.
Mark Twain
Image
Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar.
Mark Twain
Image
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
Mark Twain
Image
When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.
Mark Twain
Image
Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brains. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat. Perhaps a couple of whales would be enough.
Mark Twain
Image
A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.
Mark Twain
Image
Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.
Mark Twain
Image
There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled.
Mark Twain
Image
The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.
Mark Twain
Image
To gnaw on is human, towards digest, divine.
Mark Twain
Image
If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
Mark Twain
Image
The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.
Mark Twain
Image
There was a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in.
Mark Twain
Image
Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.
Mark Twain
Image
I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.
Mark Twain