I remembered this routine from Hal Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight” from when I saw the play on Broadway as a kid and watching it again when CBS did a special of it in 1967. These quotes come from a DVD of that production.
Here is Holbrook as Twain on war:
"Man is the only animal that deals in the atrocity of war. He's the only one that for sordid wages goes forth in cold blood to exterminate his own kind. He has a motto for this, 'Our country right or wrong.' Any man who fails to shout it is a traitor. Only the others are patriots.
"Say, who is the country? Is it the government? In a republic, the government is merely a servant, a temporary one. Its function is to obey orders not originate them. Only when the republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it's wrong. Otherwise the nation has sold its honor for a phrase.
"And if that phrase needs help he gets another one, 'Even though the war be wrong, we are in it. We must fight it out. We cannot retire without dishonor.'
"Why, not even a burglar could have said that better."
This was actually one of the first postings I made on Dailykos back in 2005 called Mark Twain Is Always Pertinent
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