Цитаты из книги автора Mark Twain The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

I will save your lives and else not

We have no thoughts of our own, no opin­ions of our own; they are trans­mit­ted to us, trained into us. All that is orig­i­nal in us, and there­fore fairly cred­itable or dis­cred­itable to us, can be cov­ered up and hid­den by the point of a cam­bric nee­dle, all the rest be­ing atoms con­trib­uted by, and in­her­ited from, a pro­ces­sion of an­ces­tors that stretches back a bil­lion years to the Adam-clam or grasshop­per or mon­key from whom our race has been so te­diously and os­ten­ta­tiously and un­prof­itably de­vel­oped.

I could have given my own sect the pref­er­ence and made ev­ery­body a Pres­by­te­rian with­out any trou­ble, but that would have been to af­front a law of hu­man na­ture: spir­i­tual wants and in­stincts are as var­i­ous in the hu­man fam­ily as are phys­i­cal ap­petites, com­plex­ions, and fea­tures, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the re­li­gious gar­ment whose color and shape and size most nicely ac­com­mo­date them­selves to the spir­i­tual com­plex­ion, an­gu­lar­i­ties, and stature of the in­di­vid­ual who wears it; and, be­sides, I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the might­i­est con­ceiv­able, and then when it by and by gets into self­ish hands, as it is al­ways bound to do, it means death to hu­man lib­erty and paral­y­sis to hu­man thought.

There you see the hand of that aw­ful power, the Ro­man Catholic Church. In two or three lit­tle cen­turies it had con­verted a na­tion of men to a na­tion of worms. Be­fore the day of the Church’s supremacy in the world, men were men, and held their heads up, and had a man’s pride and spirit and in­de­pen­dence; and what of great­ness and po­si­tion a per­son got, he got mainly by achieve­ment, not by birth. But then the Church came to the front, with an axe to grind; and she was wise, sub­tle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat—or a na­tion; she in­vented “di­vine right of kings,” and propped it all around, brick by brick, with the Beat­i­tudes—wrench­ing them from their good pur­pose to make them for­tify an evil one; she preached (to the com­moner) hu­mil­ity, obe­di­ence to su­pe­ri­ors, the beauty of self-sac­ri­fice; she preached (to the com­moner) meek­ness un­der in­sult; preached (still to the com­moner, al­ways to the com­moner) pa­tience, mean­ness of spirit, non­re­sis­tance un­der op­pres­sion; and she in­tro­duced her­i­ta­ble ranks and aris­toc­ra­cies, and taught all the Chris­tian pop­u­la­tions of the Earth to bow down to them and wor­ship them.

Well, I may as well con­fess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it: I was be­gin­ning to have a base han­ker­ing to be its first pres­i­dent my­self. Yes, there was more or less hu­man na­ture in me; I found that out.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire it­self.

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can’t knock it out of him.

Dear, dear, it only shows that there is noth­ing di­viner about a king than there is about a tramp, af­ter all. He is just a cheap and hol­low ar­ti­fi­cial­ity when you don’t know he is a king. But re­veal his qual­ity, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.

When the spirit of prophecy comes upon you, you merely take your in­tel­lect and lay it off in a cool place for a rest, and un­ship your jaw and leave it alone; it will work it­self: the re­sult is prophecy.

Old habit of mind is one of the tough­est things to get away from in the world.