You take the lies out
and you take the malice out of him …
and he’ll disappear
Tom Ballou, the most immortal liar that ever I struck. He couldn’t ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather.
Why, he would make you fairly shudder. He was the most scandalous liar! I left him, finally; I couldn’t stand it.
The proverb says, “like master, like man;” and if you stay with that kind of a man, you’ll come under suspicion by and by, just as sure as you live.
He paid first-class wages; but said I, What’s wages when your reputation’s in danger?
So I let the wages go, and froze to my reputation.
And I’ve never regretted it.
Reputation’s worth everything, ain’t it?
That’s the way I look at it.
He had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world—all packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged.
They weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air.
People thought it was vanity, but it wasn’t, it was malice.
If you only saw his foot, you’d take him to be nineteen feet high, but he wasn’t; it was because his foot was out of drawing.
He was intended to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot was made first, but he didn’t get there; he was only five feet ten.
That’s what he was, and that’s what he is.
You take the lies out of him, and he’ll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he’ll disappear.*
They saw that the ancient religions of Britain, the beliefs of the druids and like, went away when folks stopped believing in them.
Maybe if we stopped listening to lies.
Stopped reading about lies.
Stopped reporting the lies.
The liar would go away.
From Life on the Mississippi by mark Twain (Harper, New York, 1923).
No Haiku For You 