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It's 148 years since Mark Twain wrote this highly relevant satire:

"Running for Governor"

http://twainquotes.com/Galaxy/...

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

The saying definitely predates Twain:

http://www.twainquotes.com/Lies.html
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

And soon after this catches on again, writers will denounce its foolishness and the way it cheapens their craft... again.

I am reminded of something that a much better writer than Mr. Fellowes once did. The story is that "purple prose", which was always ridiculous, was becoming commonplace due to serialized stories in periodicals. To draw attention and make light of this, Mark Twain wrote a fine example of the purple prose style, but tried to push it a bit farther than most audiences would tolerate. The result is quite funny.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, according to TwainQuotes.com (scroll down to the bottom of the page).

Nitpick: that quote is probably not due to Twain at all (see bottom of linked page); consequently it is self-illustrating.

The correlation to humans of results obtained from vivisection on any animals (including chimps) has always been questionable at best.

The reasons vivisection is still conducted comes down to 3 points:

1) Inflicting suffering on animals is unfortunately relatively cheap compared to more humane methods, even though the humane methods can produce better results.

2) Nearly all scientists that already perform vivisection simply don't want to adapt from the techniques they already are most familiar with, regardless of the consequent elimination of animal suffering.

3) The legislation covering the release of new products basically assumes vivisection and isn't sufficiently flexible to encourage or even accommodate alternative methods.

http://www.twainquotes.com/Vivisection.html

A lie can make its way around the world before the truth can get its boots on.

Nitpick: the quote is not from Pratchett, and probably isn't from Twain either.

Forget XKCD, here is the obligatory Mark Twain quote!

Well using this logic you could also say that just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. There is a problem with this sort of thinking even if to some extent replacement of humans in workplaces is a fact.

Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.

Really? Never heard that one from Mark Twain. I googled it and found several hints towards this, but never a reliable source. In fact, one reliable sources seem to omit this quote:

http://www.twainquotes.com/quotesatoz.html has nothing

Got one for me?

. . . about a decade later in a letter to Bell's father-in-law.

I'm reminded of the New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."

This program apparently scans the blogosphere... but I wonder what that is. Is that the web? If I just have a page that expresses an opinion, is it counted as a blog, or do I have to register it somewhere as a blog? Is an RSS feed required at a site, or on the page, to be a blog? Does the word blog have to appear in the header or are "essays" counted? And if I have more than one domain name, how is that counted? Does the text have to be different in two cases in order to be counted as two opinions? How does one distinguish two distinct people who merely word things like an advocacy group told them from one person who owns two (or fifty or a thousand) sites and puts the same text on all of them? Is the site careful to understand the difference between quotation and inclusion for critique? How much are they investing in tools that allow people to detect and correct misclassification or is this "all in good fun" and "for entertainment only"?

Perhaps the answers to these are documented, but that almost doesn't matter. The point is that however they're answered, the answer is arbitrarily chosen and are not The Truth no matter how they are chosen.

In the olden days, everyone had an opinion on things, but the opinions were distributed, and people were forced to engage each other interactively in order to discover other opinions. They might agree or disagree, but it was the conversation that caused them to grow and learn. In the new world, we can count how many total opinions there are, and avoid ever talking to someone who disagrees. This takes the dialog and growth part out of the equation. At that point, what difference does it make how many people agree or disagree, since we'll just be measuring the efficiency of the cloning process, not the validity of ideas.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Mark Twain

Man, but Jane Austen? So far, I haven't seen any evidence against this.

Mark Twain pulled the first American print run of Huckleberry Finn after an anonymous engraver made pornographic changes in an illustration. Huck Finn's Obscene Illustration

30,000 pages to be snipped and replaced. However crude or funny the in-jokes stay in-house.

The problem isn't prudery. The problem is in pushing the limits of the voluntary ratings system until it collapses and the government takes over. You want to introduce nudity and sex into your game? Fine. But do it openly under an M or AO rating. Don't hide behind the excuse that adult content is accessible only through a mod.

There have been months right here in America when I wished I could work less than 27 days, 10-12 hours a day.

Oh, yeah, that's called "February."

Don't forget that America built it's own industrial wealth in the first place with children literally chained to machines. It's easy enough looking down with contempt from the lofty hights acheived by the same methods.

Oh, yeah, and on the broken backs of coolies. They're ancestor worshipers. They haven't forgotten, even if you have.

Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy
To the Person Sitting in Darkness

Payback's gonna be a bitch. I'm not looking forward to it, but I can't honestly say we don't have it coming.

KFG

Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903.
See http://www.twainquotes.com/Copyright.html

Probably for the same reason "The Adventures of Mark Twain" is VHS only.

No budget for a DVD conversion.

Thereby reducing the average IQ of cats, while greatly increasing that of MBAs.

The poster is alluding to a quote by Mark Twain:

If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
- Notebook, 1894

More Twain quotes on cats here.

Right here in Cincinnati, Ohio a cable company (no names) has hired and trained installation and support personell for a VoIP roll out. They plan on offering unlimited service to those who are more than delighted with their digital cable and *oad *unner Internet service.

Considering the amount of low key recruiting they did I'd say they plan on it working. They actually plan on kicking normal home phone service out of their homes completely.

Not bad for a city that is said to live twenty years behind the rest of the world.

Some other Twain quotes on patriotism. I particularly like the second and fifth ones.

Yes, I readily admit I did use a pretty broad brush since I didn't want to get into a long dissertation here. I stand by my personal observations, but it's only my own opinion and worth what you paid for it.

My wife is one of those people who is both an artist and a professional writer. She switched from a Mac to a PC around 1997 so I won't disagree with you a bit that there are plenty of exceptions in both directions.

Oh, about that Mark Twain fellow, he didn't use a Mac either, he did use a typewriter, though. Well, after 1874 anyway.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

Oh yeah, well we have one in Cincinnati. Beat that, damn mormons...

and I quote: "When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times."

Wikipedia. I'm sure everybody knows about it by now, but it's a great source of information for just about anything you can imagine.

Your sig is a prime example of the challenges involved in relying on the Internet for information.

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. - Mark Twain

I've seen both that and the following:

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.

The latter seems much more likely to me (and is the one on quote.wikipedia.org, ironically enough), but both are widespread on the Internet.

I finally found a citation at twainquotes.com, but that version of the quote waffles:

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

Now, is the quote literal, or did Mr. Clemens write one or the other, and the site isn't willing to assert which? I can't find any online copies of the book to satisfy my curiosity.

Could the Encyclopedia Brittanica answer this for me? Could I have gotten this far in my research this quickly without the Internet? Probably not. But the Internet is far from a panacea.

Well, that's almost what my sig is. I wonder which it is.

he'd have chucked his invention in the trash and announced voice over wire, if not impossible, something not desirable. "I had this vision - once the 'telephone', as I call it, had been installed in households everywhere, becoming an essential instrument, suddenly every quack medicine peddlar would begin abusing it. Mark Twain was right, I should not have invented it".

The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
- Letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888

Twain Quotes

• Homer: Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.
• Mark Twain: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics

The original quote was from Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Definately one of, if not the first literary hacker. He does with words what only the frenzied few can do with code.
Links:
http://www.quoteland.com/qldb/author/6?qlSess=03ba 3cfa64493982c9965db8ddb0b7e8
http://www.twainquotes.com/Death.html
The previous page rather seems to exert that the quote in question is urban legendish.

i always though that Twain quote was "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," but i guess it's a case of a morphing quote.

this page says that the first instance of this quote was written as: "the report of my death was an exaggeration." doesn't really have the same "ring" to it, does it?

- j