Linux Literature

In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus,
"one when he was a boy and one when he was a man."
                -- Mark Twain

In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into
use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather
which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.
                -- Mark Twain

In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but
the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they
have obtained from books of travel.
                -- Mark Twain

In the first place, God made idiots; this was for practice; then he made
school boards.
                -- Mark Twain

In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and
struggled and had lots of children.  There was a Frenchman who talked funny
and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the
crunch he was all courage.  Those novels would make you retch.
                -- Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, on the generic Canadian
                   novel.

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has
shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.  Therefore ... in the Old
Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred
thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the
Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long.  ... There is
something fascinating about science.  One gets such wholesome returns of
conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
                -- Mark Twain

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of
24 hours.
                -- Mark Twain, on New England weather

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely
the most important.
                -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Case of Identity"

It is a wise father that knows his own child.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"

It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits:
freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.
                -- Mark Twain