A news blurb on Yahoo from the New Yorker sparked this thought, so blame them if you find it startling or outrageous.

From the piece,

It only took a 100 years or so, but the world is finally getting a piece of Mark Twain's mind on the subject of free expression and whether it's safer for your words to be expressed after you're dead.

It quotes a thought-provoking "revelation" from a 1905 essay of Twain's called "The Privilege of the Grave" --

"We have charity for what the dead say. We may disapprove of what they say, but we do not insult them, we do not revile them, as knowing they cannot now defend themselves. If they should speak, what revelations there would be!"

The issue of the New Yorker containing the essay comes out Monday.

Mark Twain was the nom de plume of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, MO and died on April 21, 1910 in Redding, CT, at the ripe old age of 74.

In this age where life appears to be so cheap that two questionable wars and a thriving weapons industry appear to be beneath swift and decisive action, one can only wonder if Mr. Clemens was a bit of an oracle for his time, watching events of today unfold, or if our entire society has always been this way...or, perhaps worse, if we showed strong signs of becoming what we have achieved over the past 8 years, and Mr. Clemens might have been attempting to brace us for the words that our own dead and dying might someday have for us if we failed to heed his warnings.

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