Mark Twain1835–1910A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Following the Equator (1897), Ch. 32.- Following the Equator, vol. 1 (vol. 5 of The Writings of Mark Twain), chapter 11, epigraph, p. 125 (1897, reprinted 1968).
- Letter to Annie Moffett Webster (1 September 1876)
- Following the Equator (1897), Ch. 52, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
- Said to portrait painter Samuel Johnson Woolf, cited in Here am I (1941), Samuel Johnson Woolf
- Following the Equator (1897), Ch. 48, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
- “Following the Equator: Pudd’s ahead Wilson’s New Calendar”, as quoted in Medicine in Quotations: Views of Health and Disease Through the Ages (2006), p. 146
Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.
Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935), p. 381It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
