Samuel Langhorne Clemens: Misanthrope
"I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning--knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair."
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 2 April 1899
"Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag."
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 1899
"Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?"
- "The Czar's Soliloquy"
Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity; He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly--a lark which must have cost him a regret or two when He came to think it over & observe effects.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 25 January 1900
"As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it--it is like hitting a child."
- Autobiographical dictation, 25 June 1906
There isn't any way to libel the human race.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned...of the dangerously insane and such as are not.
- Mark Twain's Notebooks, 1893-1903
"We all belong to the nasty stinking little human race, & of course it is not nice for God's beloved vermin to scoff at each other... Oh, we are a nasty little lot--& to think there are people who would like to save us & continue us. It won't happen if I have any influence."
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 2 April 1899
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