Mark Twain wrote that in No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger, and it was the first thing I thought of after catching my breath from the longest, guffawingest belly laugh I’ve had in months, possibly years.
And that was just day one of the competition.
Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them — and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon — laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution — these can lift at a colossal humbug — push it a little — crowd it a little — weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.
Hi, Finley! Thank you for the full quote from Mark Twain and for citing the source —No 44 The Mysterious Stranger. The short version of my response is that I hunted for the full quote on line, but only found fragments — mainly the opening sentence and the final one– and a version in AI that said that the quote didn’t come from one of his books! Now, the longer version: I knew it came from one of Twain’s works and was probably attributed to a fictional version of Satan, because my college roommate used to recite the quote lovingly in full! So i thank you and I’m sure Mark Twain’s spirit is happy, too.
Glad to help. I had a similar experience with another quotation said to be from Twain and it took me years to find the actual source because of its different wording. My correspondence with Nigel Rees, longtime presenter of the BBC Radio 4 “Quote…Unquote” show, tells the story:
[2016]
Nigel,
I wonder if you might be able to assist with a quotation I’ve been trying to track down for many years – since 1983, in fact. In December of that year, the late-night news programme NBC News Overnight, whose Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award citation said was “possibly the best written and most intelligent news program ever”, ended its 18-month run. Linda Ellerbee closed the final broadcast thus:
“The final quote is from Mark Twain, discussing the young missionary who went out among the cannibals. Said Twain: ‘They listened with the greatest of interest to everything he had to say. And then they ate him.’ This is the three hundred sixty-seventh edition of Overnight. There are no more. And so it goes.”
I’ve found several references to Texas Congressman Mo Udall saying this after a failed presidential bid, and given her journalism career, it seems very likely to me that’s where Ellerbee heard it, but I‘ve never found it in reading many thousands of pages of Twain’s writing and letters. However, it certainly sounds like Twain (except that he probably would have used “et him”), and he did speak of cannibals a fair amount, often in his speeches. I can’t imagine why Udall would invent a Twain quote when there’s such a wealth of real ones, so I continue to wonder if it’s actually from Twain. I think it probably is and I just have yet to find it.
—
Rees thought this one was likely another of the dozens of quotes wrongly attributed to Twain, but did find a distantly related quote that was somewhat similar. However, six years later I wrote again:
[2023]
Nigel,
I’m pleased to report that I’ve finally found, purely by accident while reading another Mark Twain book, a much closer source of the Twain quotation I asked about six years ago (our exchange below). If only I’d thought to look up ‘then they eat him’ instead of ‘then they ate him’. So the Congressman and then Ellerbee were actually fairly true to the original, merely rewording it, one assumes, for a modern audience.
From his essay “Papers of the Adams Family”, part 1, “Extract from Methuselah’s Diary”:
Tenth Day—All the whole city did flock to the streets, the walls, the housetops and all places of vantage, to get sight of the savages new come to town from the famous tribe of the Jabalites, that live not in houses, but in tents, and wander in lawless hordes through the length and breadth of the great deserts in the far northeast that lie toward the land of Nod. These came to the number of twenty, greater and lesser chiefs, with many servants, all upon camels and dromedaries, with a fantastic sort of barbaric pomp, to make submission to my father and enter into a covenant of peace, they receiving goods and trinkets and implements of husbandry, and undertaking to make the right of way secure and not molest our caravans and merchants. A visit like to this they make to us as often as once in fifty or sixty years, and then go away and break the covenant and make trouble again. But they are not always to blame. They covenant to go and abide upon lands set apart for them, and subsist by the arts of peace; but the agents sent out to govern them do cheat them and maltreat them, removing them to other stations not so good and stealing from them their fertile lands and hunting districts, and abusing them with blows when they resist—a thing they will not abide; and so they rise by night and slaughter all that fall into their hands, revenging the agents’ treachery and oppression as best they can. Then go our armies forth to carry desolation to their hearthstones but succeed not. These that came today went about the city viewing the wonders of it, yet never exclaiming, nor betraying admiration in any way. At the audience many loving speeches were made upon both sides, and they were feasted and sent away with store of presents, mainly implements of husbandry, the which they will fashion into weapons and go out against their persecutors again. They were a wild spectacle, and fierce of countenance, a goodly show; but they and the other tribes of their sort are a sore problem to my father and his council. They worship no god; and if we in goodness of heart do send a missionary to show them the way of life, they listen with respect to all he hath to say, and then they eat him. This doth tend to hinder the spread of light.