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Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (born November 30, 1835, Florida, Missouri, U.S.-died April 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut), American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain published the text in The Stolen White Elephant Etc. The silent assertion that there wasn't anything going on in which humane and intelligent people ought to be interested."On the Decay of the Art of Lying" is a short essay written by Mark Twain in 1880 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut. The clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion. Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned from pulpit to press all the way down to the bottom of society.

For example, it would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery, and yet in those days of Emancipation agitation, those agitators got small help from anyone. It requires no art: you simply keep still and conceal the truth.

Here are a few passages from his "lying" piece: "When I talk about the decay in the art of lying, I'm talking about the silent lie, the unspoken one. May I suggest we read Mark Twain rather than Kenneth Starr? At the end of the century (the 19th, that is), Twain wrote a piece called "On the Decay In the Art of Living." At the time, he had written several scathing essays on our policy in the Philippines, of which nothing too much was said in the mainstream press.