1.28.2010

Mark Twain doesn't want your snake oil

Mark Twain wasn't just a writer--he was also a bad ass. Letters of Note reprinted a letter Twain wrote to a charlatan salesman. He writes:
A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.
I think the response to that is, "Oh snap."

3 comments:

  1. "The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link."

    That is the most brilliant thing I've read all week.

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  2. I had no idea that spammers were working from such a longstanding tradition. Go, Mark!

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  3. The brilliance brings tears to my eyes. I am newly inspired in my relationships with telemarketers.

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