“From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,”

In popular culture today, Twain is “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” Ron Powers, the author of “Mark Twain: A Life,” said in a phone interview. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/books/10twain.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=arts