Free
Mark Twain

The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious.
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    Take a jackass, for instance: a jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because he is a jackass; but a nobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass.
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    The fact is, it is just a sort of polished-up court of Comanches,
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    They thought I was one of those fire-belching dragons
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal;
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else’s without remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him gratis, and be ready to come at a moment’s notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grain around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarms from my lord’s dovecote settled on their crops they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    And yet they were not slaves, not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen.
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    The priests had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of things was ordained of God;
  • Lianehas quoted2 years ago
    Measured by modern standards, they were merely modified savages, those people.
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