"Man is made of dirt - I saw him made. I am not made of dirt. Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes to-day and is gone to-morrow; he begins as dirt and departs as stench; I am of the aristocracy of the Imperishables. And man has the Moral Sense. You understand? He has the Moral Sense. That would seem to be difference enough between us, all by itself."

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!"

"Men have nothing in common with me--there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him-- caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, whether his mother is sick or well, whether he is looked up to in society or not, whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent."

"I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety- nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise--perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it--and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race--the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions"

"Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you can. You belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine and a happiness- machine combined. The two functions work together harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department the other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a pain--maybe a dozen. In most cases the man's life is about equally divided between happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness predominates--always; never the other. Sometimes a man's make and disposition are such that his misery- machine is able to do nearly all the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of what happiness is. Everything he touches, everything he does, brings a misfortune upon him. You have seen such people? To that kind of a person life is not an advantage, is it? It is only a disaster. Sometimes for an hour's happiness a man's machinery makes him pay years of misery. Don't you know that? It happens every now and then." ( )

Excellent narration in this LibriVox recording. The story is a somewhat bizarre satire on Christian religious beliefs set in the Middle Ages in Austria. ( )

This book was odd, and very trippy, and kind of nightmarish. But it was very much ahead of its time, and prophetic, too, about human nature and endless war.

The premise is easy to explain: a group of boys befriend an angel named Satan (supposedly, not that Satan - that's his uncle). In execution, Twain has much to say about fate, human nature, the insidiousness of peer pressure/group think, and morality.

It is only at the end when Satan drops the proverbial bomb that you realize Twain set up the entire book as an argument for why there is no God. It's... fascinating. And trippy. And made my brain hurt a bit. But in a good way. ( )

56/39-Υπέροχο πραγματικά . Βιβλίο γεμάτο σκανταλιές και παιδική ανεμελιά . ( )

This book was one of Mark Twain’s late works, written at a time when the author was convinced that his misery-machine (to use an expression from the book) worked much harder than his happiness machine. The narrative reflects his scorn of humanity; to term their behavior brutish is an insult to animals, as Satan repeatedly points out. Satan appears as a companion to a boy in an Austrian village late in the 16th century, Theodore, the narrator of the book. The adventures this companion initiates are at times a foretaste of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. There are also more than a few echoes of various versions of the Faust legend.
Although Theodore is the “I” of the book, it seems as if it is Satan who expresses the views of the author. The book recounts scenes of persecution of so-called witches and heretics, as well as other evils, such as the exploitation of poor workers by the rich. Satan ascribes it all to that which is said to differentiate humankind from all other animals, his moral sense. “Moral sense” serves as a leitmotif of the book, functioning similarly to “quality” in a section of the author’s earlier Huckleberry Finn. The book offers only two ways out: One is humor, providing humans turn at last from lampooning coarse targets and aim at “colossal humbug”: “Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution” (p. 114 of my copy). The other is the insight that closes the book: none of this is real. There is only you, but you are just a thought.
Since this reader cannot shake the conviction of being a flesh-and-blood person on a real planet, I take my hope for humankind from another thought: for all of the author’s sarcastic dismissal of the moral sense, it is surely Twain’s sense of right and wrong that fuels his outrage. ( )