Mark Twain Quotes

Any idiot can be complicated. It takes a genius to be simple.

If we start to dumb down what has been made clear, where does that stop?

Some people complain there are too many people on earth, Some people complain about secret societies, Some people accuse others of not being able to wake up early. Almost all people complain about something.

Africa is people" may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.

Are you crazy? I don't want to wear ideas. I don't want to have all these complicated thing.

There's plenty of intelligence in the world, but the courage to do things differently is in short supply.

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

If your work is so smart that only smart people get it, it's not that smart.

Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

I empathize with those who yearn for a simpler world, for some bygone golden age of domestic and international tranquility. But for the mass of humanity it is an age that never was.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

I tend to think having an impact on the world is a lot more complicated than government.

People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn't rocket science. We've chosen one of the world's simplest professions.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

The connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limit of his capacity. No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

With all due respect to the world's great drummers - it ain't brain surgery.

Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

In what I think is the most serious problem the world faces, which is the population explosion, we will come I think to a time when measures that are not even dreamt of now will become necessary.

Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.