Never argue. Mark Twain: Never argue with idiots

Mark Twain said:

Never argue with idiots, you will sink to their level where they will crush you with their experience.

In general, Mark Twain was an interesting person and a good writer. The more I live, the more convinced I am of the truth of his words.

You can overcome the chaos around you, but you cannot overcome the chaos in another person's head. Alas, this is impossible. If your interlocutor is not inclined to conduct a discussion following logic, you should immediately end the conversation and henceforth avoid communication with such a person.

Because only logic determines the essence of things. It's not about materialism. The point is the cause-and-effect laws that determine what happens to us and around us.

It's funny, but any religion is also based on logic. Of course, in the case of religion, unprovable things are taken as an axiom. This is how religion differs from science - in the latter, a repeatedly proven fact that does not require proof is taken as an axiom. Just so as not to waste time. In religion it is somewhat different. Need to accept on faith a fact that has no evidence, and in fact is not a fact. This is necessary because This fact serves as the foundation for building further logical chains. Otherwise, disputes will constantly arise between believers, for example, whether there is a God or not. But believers agree that “God exists, he is a supreme being incapable of error and we believe in it”. Then they can argue for as long as they want about what they can eat during Lent or whether they can wear a hat to church. But the first fact they recognize makes them a community, people with common beliefs. Further, believers agree that the basic laws that God gave them, in whom they believe, are written in a certain holy book. This unites them even more, because they begin to follow a single logical chain. God exists, he gave us laws, these laws are true. The more common facts the interlocutors recognize, the more likely it is that they will be able to agree and interact.

Unfortunately, in our lives we often meet people in whom there is “nothing sacred.” What does it mean? This means there is complete chaos in their heads and they do not have the ability to build logical chains. They have no supporting postulates; today they believe in gravity, and tomorrow they will tell you that it does not exist. No scientific arguments and examples can overcome the dense ignorance of a self-confident idiot. At best, your interaction with such people will be reduced to constantly proving to them axioms known to the whole world. From time to time you will even feel like you are winning. But it will always be a game on the idiot's field, where the rules change regardless of either you or him. There's no logic there. Chaos.

My advice to you. Avoid idiots.

Men, never fight women.
Both victory and defeat will be a shame for you.

Never complain about things your parents couldn't give you. They may have given you everything they had. Each of you owes them a huge debt.

Real men never get offended by women. They just wait for them to calm down and continue to love them further.

Never complain about things your parents couldn't give you. They may have given you everything they had. Each of you owes them a huge debt. Take care of your parents.

Before spending huge amounts of money on defense, we need to create a standard of living for people that they will want to defend.

Smart people do not so much seek solitude as they avoid the fuss created by fools.

Most people don't listen to you with a desire to understand, they listen to you with a desire to respond.

We draw our own world. Never say, “Everything is bad for me,” because words, like caustic ink, eat into the pages of a book.
Believe me, everything is fine with you :)

Experience is called experience because it is not always known what the result will be.

The famous writer was born in the small town of Florida (Missouri, one of the 15 slave states of the South) on November 30, 1835 in the large family of John and Jane Clemens.

Mark Twain - short biography in quotes and aphorisms

As a child, Mark Twain was a mischievous tomboy, almost the same as the heroes of his future books - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (by the way, at the same time the writer made friends with the son of a local drunkard - Tom, whom he described in the novel). Already at the age of nine, Twain became addicted to smoking and, at the head of a small group of the same pranksters, skipped classes. It is no coincidence that he would later write about himself:

I have never allowed school to interfere with my education.

And this is the honest truth. The carefree life ended around the age of 12, when my father died of pneumonia. The barely grown boy (like his older brother), to help the family, got a job in the printing house of a local newspaper, where he worked as a typesetter and then even wrote notes. But despite the fact that Mark Twain did not receive a decent education as a child, his lively mind strived for knowledge and he found it in public libraries.

Before he invented Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and even took the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” Samuel Clemens tried his hand as a pilot (as a child, he spent a lot of time on the Mississippi River, fascinated by the movement of waves and steamboats). And his pseudonym mark twain is a cry meaning that the minimum depth suitable for the passage of river vessels has been reached. Since the river always held a special place in the writer’s heart, he liked his work, as well as the intriguing characters he encountered along the way. The people he met were only too happy to satisfy his spiritual hunger with a generous dose of entertaining stories, many of which found a home in the book Life on the Mississippi. Unfortunately, one of the most powerful tragedies in the writer’s life happened here on the river - he convinced his younger brother Henry will also become a pilot. But the ship Pennsylvania, where Henry was training, exploded, and a few days later the young man died in the hospital from severe injuries. Mark Twain blamed himself for the death of his brother and listened with bitterness to congratulations for not being on board (“May God forgive them, for they do not know what they are saying”).

The Civil War that broke out in 1861 had a particular influence on the writer’s beliefs. At the dawn of his journalistic career, southerner Mark Twain had a rather lenient attitude towards slavery (although his older brother Orion was an abolitionist and took the side of Abraham Lincoln, an American politician who led the fight for the emancipation of slaves). But having lived through a tragic civil war in which his native South was destroyed by the North and which claimed many lives and destroyed much of what Twain believed in, he became angry with those in power both for his upbringing and for their hypocrisy in exploiting idealism and patriotic feelings to start a war. Disappointed, he notes in his notebook:

It's wonderful that America was discovered, but it would have been much more wonderful if Columbus had sailed by

After living through the Civil War, Mark Twain became convinced that whites owed blacks a debt. Outraged by the senseless violence of lynch mobs, Twain would write an incriminating pamphlet, “The United Lynching States.” True, this will happen much later, at the very end of his life. In the meantime, the Civil War (in which the writer even spent several weeks fighting on the side of the Southerners), which destroyed the private shipping company, put an end to Mark Twain’s piloting career. And he went to the mining town of Virginia City (Nevada), where his older brother received the post of assistant to the governor. There he devoted himself to the mining industry for a time, and then began to work as a reporter for a large newspaper, where, although he wrote a number of truthful articles, he earned a reputation as a joker by publishing various hoaxes. After which he made a number of conclusions about human nature:

April 1st is a day that reminds us of who we are for the other 364 days.

One of Mark Twain's most famous hoaxes is a note about a supposedly found petrified man. As the author himself writes: “Residents of Nevada and California were literally raving about extraordinary fossils and other wonders of nature. It was difficult to find a newspaper that did not mention one or two great discoveries of this kind. And here I am, the newly minted editor of the local news department ... to to put an end to this hobby... decided to make fun of it in an extremely subtle way... So, I reported that... a fossilized man had been discovered and that all the scientists living nearby had arrived (it is known that within fifty miles there is not a single living soul there, except for a handful Indians dying of hunger) ... and agreed that this man had been in a state of complete petrification for over three hundred years."

Mark Twain humorously described the very pose of the mummy: “The body was in a sitting position, and leaned against the stones; the expression of the stone mummy was thoughtful, the state of preservation was perfect, even including left leg, which was wooden... thumb right hand rested on the nose, the thumb of the left hand supported the chin." All this was accompanied by an unambiguously satirical overtone, but... "apparently, I did it too subtly, because no one noticed that it was satire." The note not only did not surprised the residents of the city, but even for several months it was reprinted in various American newspapers, and then it was published in a major London magazine!

It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they are being fooled.

As you can see, Mark Twain looked with sarcasm at human ignorance and gullibility. He was personally acquainted with Nikola Tesla (the famous electrical engineer and inventor) and spent a lot of time in his laboratory, conducting experiments and experiments together with the scientist. Perhaps this is also why the writer throughout his life was with a great deal of skepticism not only about paranormal phenomena, but also about various newfangled trends in science. Thus, Mark Twain was one of the first to ridicule phrenology, an unscientific theory popular in the 19th century that the structure of a person’s skull can be used to judge his mental qualities. The writer visited the then “luminary” of this pseudoscience, Lorenzo Fowler, twice, both times under different fictitious names. As Mark Twain himself writes, “He looked at my highs and lows, and gave me a graph... I waited for three months and went to Fowler again. The new graph contained details of my character, but had no recognizable resemblance to the old one.” Perhaps after this visit Mark Twain will remark:

Noise proves nothing. A hen that has laid an egg often fusses as if it had laid a small planet.

Never argue with idiots. You will sink to their level, where they will crush you with their experience.

By the way, the writer had a passion not only for science, but also for technical innovations and bought them with pleasure, despite the price. So he almost immediately bought a telephone, invented in 1876, for his home in Connecticut. Mark Twain will say about another of his passions - smoking tobacco in his characteristic satirical manner:

Quitting smoking is easy. I myself have thrown a hundred times

Mark Twain lived for 30 years in a marriage with one single woman - his beloved wife Olivia (who, by the way, edited her husband's books and articles), who bore him four children. Perhaps they lived so long because, as Mark Twain himself wrote:

When my wife and I disagree, we usually do what she wants. My wife calls it a compromise

In the city of Hannibal (Missouri), where Mark Twain moved with his family and river at the age of four, the streets and inhabitants of which were forever captured in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,” a bridge named after the writer was built and caves were preserved, which he explored with local urchins . And in the city of Hartford (Connecticut) there still stands the house where Mark Twain lived and wrote his most famous works since 1874 (now there is a museum named after him). The writer, who dreamed of getting out of poverty since childhood, was able to afford a rich house in the Victorian style only after marriage (Olivia was a very wealthy woman, unlike Twain, for whom writing and journalistic fees did not bring much money). But - shut up evil tongues - there was no calculation in his marriage, only sincere love that connected two hearts not only until “until death do us part,” but also after. Having lost his Olivia, the writer never married again, although there were those who wanted to take him down the aisle.

Creation. Mark Twain and his works

Ernest Hemingway noted that all modern American literature came from one book by Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also among the famous works of the writer, it is worth noting “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “The Prince and the Pauper”, “A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur” and a collection of autobiographical stories “Life on the Mississippi”. Unfortunately, not all of the great writer’s works were published; many manuscripts were not accepted due to their daring content; some of them were banned from publication by the author himself. And finally, I want to add to the short biography of Mark Twain some quotes that very correctly interpret human nature:

Once in a lifetime, luck knocks on every person’s door, but at that time he usually sits in the nearest pub and doesn’t hear any knocking

Each person, like the Moon, has his own unlit side, which he does not show to anyone.

Anyone who doesn’t know where they’re going will be very surprised when they end up in the wrong place.

If a friendship ends, it means it never existed.

A banker is a person who will lend you an umbrella when the weather is sunny, only to take it back as soon as it starts to rain