The Fault Lies Not in the Star, But in Ourselves

“Now the trouble with an American paper is that it has no discrimination; it rakes the whole earth for blood and garbage, and the result is that you are daily overfed and suffer a surfeit. By habit you stow this muck every every day, but you come by and by to take no vital interest in it — indeed, you almost get tired of it. As a rule, forty-nine-fiftieths of it concerns strangers only — people away off yonder, a thousand miles, two thousand miles, ten thousand miles from where you are. Why, when you come to think of it, who cares what becomes of those people? I would not give the assassination of one personal friend for a whole massacre of those others. And, to my mind, one relative or neighbor mixed up in a scandal is more interesting than a whole Sodom and Gomorrah of outlanders gone rotten. Give me the home product every time.”

— Mark Twain
“Italian Without a Master,” 1904

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