Morals are an acquirement, like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis, no man is born with them.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

But I believe in one more thing, which is not acquirement: Nature.

Morals are an acquirement, like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis, no man is born with them.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)


Well said, as usual. Unfortunately they seem to be a very optional acquirement these days.

Context from:Mark Twain's Speeches

SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY COLONEL GEORGE HARVEY AT DELMONICO'S, DECEMBER 5, 1905, TO CELEBRATE THE SEVENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF MR. CLEMENS' BIRTH

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another person try my way, and see where he will come out. I desire now to repeat and emphasise that maxim: We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.

I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed: you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can't get them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your box. Morals are an acquirement--like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis--no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor.

I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that--the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the--I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her-- ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was--I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match.

Morals are of inestimable value, for every man is born crammed with sin microbes, and the only thing that can extirpate these sin microbes is morals. Now you take a sterilized Christian--I mean, you take the sterilized Christian, for there's only one. Dear sir, I wish you wouldn't look at me like that.


http://mark-twain.classic-literature.co.uk/mark-twains-speeches/ebook-page-121.asp

Twin's opening remark about exercise is funny and wrong.

Morals could well be an acquirement, the moral sense is of rational origin just as much as the sense for humor,
but the intellect required for the acquisition of both, that a man must be born with.