Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Quotes

Context

This line is from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain (1884).

Huck's floating down the Mississippi River and he washes up in a one-horse town in Arkansas, where he witnesses two confrontations that really have nothing to do with the overall plot of the novel but give Twain the opportunity to offer some commentary on the myths of Southern manhood and mob behavior.

There's a harmless drunk in town named Boggs who goes around making empty threats every time he's three sheets to the wind. This time he picks on the wrong guy, Colonel Sherburn, and Sherburn shoots him dead.

Enter the angry mob. They liked their town drunk. They go to Sherburn's house to lynch him, and Sherburn steps out on his porch with a gun and verbally hands their behinds to them for several paragraphs. He tells them they don't want none of this. They've been riled up by their leader, but what they really want to do is go home like the cowards they are. And that's what they do.

Where you've heard it

To be honest with you, this is not one of the better known quotes in American literature, so it's cool if the first time you heard it was when you read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Pretentious Factor

If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of 1-10.

We're going to give this one an average pretentiousness rating because it really depends how far you go. Say the quote by itself and you sound like you're making a grammatically questionable, yet sage, observation about human nature. Say it in the context of the entire speech—in which the speaker sets himself up as superior to the dimwitted townsfolk—and you sound a bit more high and mighty.