Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Twain

Mark Twain turns a petty grammatical habit into a class war in miniature. The “editorial we” is that smug, inflatable pronoun that lets one person masquerade as an institution: We believe, we find, we must insist. Twain’s joke is to expose the ventriloquism. When a lone editor writes “we,” he’s not being modest; he’s manufacturing authority, borrowing the collective voice of a newsroom, a public, a nation.

The list is the dagger. Kings and presidents get to say “we” because their power depends on it: the royal “we” fuses ruler and state, turning personal will into public destiny. Editors come next, and Twain is clearly enjoying the demotion-by-association: the press as a kind of unofficial monarchy, issuing decrees from the high desk. Then comes the grotesque punchline: “people with tapeworms.” It’s absurd, but it’s also precise. A tapeworm is a literal internal “we,” a parasitic companion that makes singular identity a shared tenancy. Twain’s implication is that the editorial “we” is similarly parasitic: an extra voice inside the sentence, feeding on the reader’s deference.

Context matters: Twain lived in the loud birth of mass newspapers and the professionalization of public opinion. He’d been a printer and journalist; he knew how easily print turns tone into power. The line isn’t just anti-pretension. It’s a warning about how language launders authority - and how a tiny pronoun can smuggle a throne into a paragraph.