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The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
-Mark Twain
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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in itand stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid againand that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
-Mark Twain
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The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large mattertis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
-Mark Twain
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Say the report is exaggerated.
-Mark Twain
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A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.
-Mark Twain
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To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.
-Mark Twain
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I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.
-Mark Twain
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When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
-Mark Twain
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When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victorymust follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battlebe Thou near them! With themin spiritwe also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with anavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied itfor our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
-Mark Twain
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The teacher reminded us that Romes liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sellexactly our own history over again.
-Mark Twain
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By his father he is English, by his mother he is Americanto my mind the blend which makes the perfect man.
-Mark Twain
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So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.
-Mark Twain
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Action(s)
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Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-Mark Twain
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Adversity
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By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
-Mark Twain
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Advertising
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Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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Age
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I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.
-Mark Twain
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Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.
-Mark Twain
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Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
-Mark Twain
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Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
-Mark Twain
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The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
-Mark Twain
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When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.
-Mark Twain
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Agreement
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What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one's self-approval.
-Mark Twain
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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Sometimes too much drink is barely enough.
-Mark Twain
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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
-Mark Twain
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Ambition
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Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
-Mark Twain
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America
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In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?
-Mark Twain
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It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
-Mark Twain
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There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.
-Mark Twain
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Ancestry, Ancestors
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Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
-Mark Twain
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Anger
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When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
-Mark Twain
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Appearance
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Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
-Mark Twain
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Aristocracy
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It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good -- and less trouble!
-Mark Twain
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Assumptions
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There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.
-Mark Twain
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Authors & Writing
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Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
-Mark Twain
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Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
-Mark Twain
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Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.
-Mark Twain
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As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
-Mark Twain
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Baby, Babies
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A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.
-Mark Twain
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We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.
-Mark Twain
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Banks / Banking
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A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
-Mark Twain
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Belief
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Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.
-Mark Twain
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Birds
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She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
-Mark Twain
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Bravery
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who didn't know what fear was, we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
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It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
-Mark Twain
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It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
-Mark Twain
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Cats
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I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive, finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house...The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it.
http://www.twainquotes.com
-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
-Mark Twain, Notebook (1884 entry), 1935, edited by Albert Begelow Paine
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...the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!
http://www.twainquotes.com/Cats.html
-Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad
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A home without a cat--and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat--may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?
http://www.twainquotes.com/Cats.html
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
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Caution
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Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
-Mark Twain
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Certainty
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Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
-Mark Twain
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Change
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We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.
-Mark Twain, Mark Twain at Your Fingertips
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Character
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To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
-Mark Twain
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Children
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There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
-Mark Twain
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Civilization
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Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
-Mark Twain
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Coffee (or Tea)
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After a few months' acquaintance with European coffee, one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.
-Mark Twain, 1880
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Commitment
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I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell -- you see, I have friends in both places.
-Mark Twain
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Conformity & Nonconformity
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Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
-Mark Twain
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We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
-Mark Twain
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Congress
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Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.
http://www.twainquotes.com/Congress.html
-Mark Twain, Mark Twain, a Biography
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Conservatism
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Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world -- and never will.
-Mark Twain
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The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
-Mark Twain
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The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
-Mark Twain
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Consistency
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What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.
-Mark Twain
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Consumerism
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Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.
-Mark Twain
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Conversation
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It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
-Mark Twain
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A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.
-Mark Twain
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Cowardice/Weakness
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The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.
-Mark Twain
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There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
-Mark Twain
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Creation
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Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly -- a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.
-Mark Twain
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Creativity
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Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
-Mark Twain
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Credit
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Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: -- I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.
-Mark Twain
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Crime
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A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.
-Mark Twain
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Criticism
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The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
-Mark Twain
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Customer Service / Sales
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Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
-Mark Twain
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Customs
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Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
-Mark Twain
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Cynicism
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Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.
-Mark Twain
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I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.
-Mark Twain
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Dance, Dancing
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I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases
-Mark Twain, 1862
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On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.
-Mark Twain
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Death
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The report of my death was an exaggeration.
-Mark Twain, After reading his own obituary, June 2, 1897
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Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
-Mark Twain
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Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
-Mark Twain
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We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.
-Mark Twain
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We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.
-Mark Twain
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Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
-Mark Twain
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All say, How hard it is that we have to die -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain
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Deception/Lying
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When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
-Mark Twain
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Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
-Mark Twain
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One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
http://www.twainquotes.com/
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
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A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.
-Mark Twain
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A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants.
-Mark Twain
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I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won t.
-Mark Twain
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Decisions
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I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up.
-Mark Twain
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Democracy
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I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.
-Mark Twain
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Desires
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I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.
-Mark Twain
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Despair
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It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.
-Mark Twain
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Determination
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Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
-Mark Twain
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Discovery
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What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first -- that is the idea.
-Mark Twain
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Dissent
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The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
-Mark Twain
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Doctors
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He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.
-Mark Twain
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Dogs
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By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a noble animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward--you will never get her full confidence again.
http://www.twainquotes.com
-Mark Twain, Mark Twain, a Biography
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Duty
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Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty --the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.
-Mark Twain
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Do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
-Mark Twain
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Economics
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October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
-Mark Twain
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Education
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Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
-Mark Twain
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All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
-Mark Twain, notebook, 1908
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In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
-Mark Twain
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I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
http://www.twainquotes.com , the best place for Mark Twain quotes, makes the statement about the source for this quote.
-Mark Twain, attributed, unless verified, this quote should not be regarded as authentic.
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Empire
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We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?
-Mark Twain
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Enjoyment
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The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
-Mark Twain
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Envy / Jealousy
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Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.
-Mark Twain
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Equality
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We are all alike, on the inside.
-Mark Twain
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Evangelism
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Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
-Mark Twain
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Evolution
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Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.
-Mark Twain
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I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.
-Mark Twain
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Example
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Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
-Mark Twain
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Exercise
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I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
-Mark Twain
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Experience
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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
-Mark Twain
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The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.
-Mark Twain
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Facts
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Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
-Mark Twain
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Faith
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Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
-Mark Twain
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It was the schoolboy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
-Mark Twain
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Family
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We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.
-Mark Twain
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Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.
-Mark Twain
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Fashion
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Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
-Mark Twain
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Flowers
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He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.
-Mark Twain
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Food
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When one has tasted it Watermelon he knows what the angels eat.
-Mark Twain
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Fools, Foolishness
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I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.
-Mark Twain
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It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
-Mark Twain
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Forgiveness
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Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.
-Mark Twain
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Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
-Mark Twain
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Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it
-Mark Twain
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Fortune
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Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.
-Mark Twain
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Freedom
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It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
-Mark Twain
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Friends
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Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.
-Mark Twain
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Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
-Mark Twain
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The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
-Mark Twain
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Funerals
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Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.
-Mark Twain
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I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it. About a politician who had recently died
-Mark Twain
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Futility
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He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.
-Mark Twain
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Gambling (Gaming)
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A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at Faro or in the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way.
-Mark Twain
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Genius
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Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered -- either by themselves or by others.
-Mark Twain
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God
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There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.
-Mark Twain
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Golf
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Golf is a good walk spoiled.
-Mark Twain
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Government
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It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
-Mark Twain
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We have the best government that money can buy.
-Mark Twain
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Grammar
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Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.
-Mark Twain
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Gratitude
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If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
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...gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. In time, you are made to realize that the kindness done you is become a curse and you wish it had not happened.
-Mark Twain, Autobiography
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Grief, Grieving
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Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
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A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential -- there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.
-Mark Twain
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Growth
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What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows -- it must grow; nothing can prevent it.
-Mark Twain
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Habits
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A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.
-Mark Twain
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Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
-Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
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To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know, I've done it a thousand times.
There is no primary or authoritative source for this in Twain's known writings or speeches.
-Mark Twain, attibuted
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As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.
-Mark Twain, 70th birthday speech
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Happiness
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The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
-Mark Twain
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Happiness ain't a thing in itself --it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.
-Mark Twain
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There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one: keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
-Mark Twain
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Hazing
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Mark Twain, in an interview today, spoke about hazing at West Point, and denounced the practice as a brutal one and men who indulge in it as bullies and cowards.
Why, he said, the fourth class man who is compelled to fight a man from the first class hasn't a show in the world, and it is not intended that he should. I have read the rules provided to prevent such practices, and they are wholly deficient, because one provision is omitted. I would make it the duty of a cadet to report to the authorities any case of hazing which came to his notice; make such reports a part of the vaunted West Point 'code of honor' and the beating of young boys by upper class men will be stopped.
I am not opposed to fights among boys as a general thing. If they are conducted in a spirit of fairness, I think it makes boys manly, but I do oppose compelling a little fellow to fight some man big enough to whip two of him. When I was a boy, going to school down in the Mississippi Valley, we used to have our fights, and I remember one occasion on which I got soundly trounced, but we always matched boys as nearly of a size as possible, and there was none of the cowardly methods that seem to prevail at West Point.
-Mark Twain, "New York Times", on cadet hazing, January 20, 1901
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Health
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Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
-Mark Twain
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The way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
-Mark Twain
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Heaven
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Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
-Mark Twain
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Hell
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The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.
-Mark Twain
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Help
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A man cannot be made comfortable without his own approval.
-Mark Twain
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History
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History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.
-Mark Twain
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By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.
-Mark Twain
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History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot
-Mark Twain
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Home
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One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.
-Mark Twain
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Honesty
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Honesty is the best policy -- when there is money in it.
-Mark Twain
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Honor
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It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
-Mark Twain
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Humanity
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There is a great deal of human nature in people.
-Mark Twain
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If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.
-Mark Twain
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There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
-Mark Twain
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The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.
-Mark Twain
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Man is a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
-Mark Twain
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Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
-Mark Twain
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Humility
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The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.
-Mark Twain
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Humor
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Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.
-Mark Twain
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Wit and Humor -- if any difference, it is in duration -- lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage -- the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.
-Mark Twain
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Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
-Mark Twain
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Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
-Mark Twain, Following the Equator-A Journey Around the World, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
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Idealism
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It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.
-Mark Twain, A Biography
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Ideas
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A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.
-Mark Twain
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.
-Mark Twain
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When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
-Mark Twain
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Illusion
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It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.
-Mark Twain
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Imagination
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You cannot depend on your judgments when your imagination is out of focus.
-Mark Twain
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Innovation
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The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
-Mark Twain
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Insanity
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Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
-Mark Twain
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When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
-Mark Twain
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The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.
-Mark Twain
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Insects
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As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!
-Mark Twain
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Insults
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It takes an enemy and a friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart. The one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.
-Mark Twain
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Inventing, Inventions
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Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.
-Mark Twain
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Journalism
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In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.
-Mark Twain
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Judging, Judgment
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You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
-Mark Twain
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Justice
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To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.
-Mark Twain
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I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
-Mark Twain
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A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.
-Mark Twain
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We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
-Mark Twain
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Knowledge
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We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
-Mark Twain
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The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so.
-Mark Twain
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Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.
-Mark Twain
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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
-Mark Twain
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Familiarity breeds contempt; and children.
-Mark Twain
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Language
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There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
-Mark Twain
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Laughter
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The human race has but one really affective weapon, and that is laughter.
-Mark Twain
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Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.
-Mark Twain
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Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
-Mark Twain
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Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon
-Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, ch. 10, 1916
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Law
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To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.
-Mark Twain
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Learning
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Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.
-Mark Twain
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Never learn to do anything. If you don't learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.
-Mark Twain
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Legacy
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Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
-Mark Twain
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There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
-Mark Twain
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Life
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Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.
-Mark Twain
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Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
-Mark Twain
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A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle; ...they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; ...those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It comes at last--the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them--and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence, ...a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.
-Mark Twain, Chapters from My Autobiography, III Ch. VI, 1906
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Loneliness
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There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought --a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
-Mark Twain
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Loss
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Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
-Mark Twain
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Mankind, Man
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The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
-Mark Twain, What Is Man?
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Manners
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The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.
-Mark Twain
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Marriage
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Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: The one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
-Mark Twain
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-Mark Twain, in a Letter to Will Bowen shortly after his marriage, quoted in
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Martyr, Martyrdom
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Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.
-Mark Twain
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Masses
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The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only -- not from its privileged classes.
-Mark Twain
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Media
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There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe... the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.
-Mark Twain
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The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money's sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.
That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
-Mark Twain, Monday Evening Club, Hartford, Connecticut - License ofthe Press - Published in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches,& Essays, edited by Louis J. Budd, (Library of America: 1992), pp. 551-55., March 31, 1873
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Memory
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When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
-Mark Twain
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Military, the
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That's what an army is -- a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.
-Mark Twain
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I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.
-Mark Twain
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Mistakes
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Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
-Mark Twain
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Moderation
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Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.
-Mark Twain
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Money
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The lack of money is the root of all evils.
-Mark Twain
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I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
-Mark Twain
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His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.
-Mark Twain
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Mother
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My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
-Mark Twain
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Murder
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If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
source: http://www.twainquotes.com/
-Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
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Music
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There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.
-Mark Twain
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought -- by force of circumstances, not argument -- to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.
-Mark Twain
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France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.
-Mark Twain
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Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.
-Mark Twain
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Nature
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Warm summer sun, shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here. Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Good night, dear Heart, Good night, good night.
-Mark Twain
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Necessity
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Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
-Mark Twain
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Obscurity
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Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.
-Mark Twain
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Opera
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The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. On Lohengrin
-Mark Twain
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Opinion
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Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.
-Mark Twain
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It is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
-Mark Twain
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It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.
-Mark Twain
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Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
-Mark Twain
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Optimism
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There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.
-Mark Twain
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The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
-Mark Twain
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Ordinary
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If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people.
-Mark Twain
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Pain
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Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.
-Mark Twain
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Parenting
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My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.
-Mark Twain
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Persistence
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Stars are good too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed last night I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn't reach, which astonished me. Then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into thee midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could've held out a little longer, maybe I could've got one.
-Mark Twain
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The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit.
-Mark Twain
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Pessimism
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Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.
-Mark Twain
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I think a compliment ought to always precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.
-Mark Twain
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Noise proves nothing, Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
-Mark Twain
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Philosophy
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If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
-Mark Twain
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Pilgrims
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If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.
-Mark Twain
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Plagiarism
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What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.
-Mark Twain
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Poetry
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War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
-Mark Twain
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Politics
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When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?
-Mark Twain
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In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.
-Mark Twain
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Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.
-Mark Twain
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Praise
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When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.
-Mark Twain
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If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.
-Mark Twain
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I can live for two months on a good compliment.
-Mark Twain
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There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me--I always feel that they have not said enough.
-Mark Twain, Speeches 1923, Fulton Day, Jamestown
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Prayer
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Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
-Mark Twain
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Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
-Mark Twain
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More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.
-Mark Twain
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Principles
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Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
-Mark Twain
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Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.
-Mark Twain
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Prison
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Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
-Mark Twain, speech, November 23, 1900
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Procrastination
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Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
-Mark Twain
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.
-Mark Twain
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Promises
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I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.
http://www.twainquotes.com/Promises.html
-Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
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Reading
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A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
-Mark Twain
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People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.
-Mark Twain
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My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.
-Mark Twain
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A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
-Mark Twain
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The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
-Mark Twain
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Reason
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From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one -- to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.
-Mark Twain
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Recognition
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The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.
-Mark Twain
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By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.
-Mark Twain
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He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.
-Mark Twain
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Reform, Correction
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Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
-Mark Twain
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Religion
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I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.
-Mark Twain
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There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.
-Mark Twain
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Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.
-Mark Twain
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We had the sky up there, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or just happened.
-Mark Twain
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Respect
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In his private heart no man much respects himself.
-Mark Twain
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When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
-Mark Twain
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True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.
-Mark Twain
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Reverence
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The ordinary reverence, the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary, costs nothing. Reverence for one's own sacred things--parents, religion, flag, laws and respect for one's own beliefs--these are feelings which we cannot even help. They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing. There is no personal merit in breathing. But the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours. You can't revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you tried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try. If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean it does nowadays, because we can't burn him.
http://www.twainquotes.com/Reverence.html
-Mark Twain, Following the Equator
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Ridicule
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There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
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No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.
-Mark Twain
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Right, Rightness
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Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
-Mark Twain
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Never do wrong when people are looking.
-Mark Twain
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Royalty, Kings, Queens
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A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.
-Mark Twain
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All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised.
-Mark Twain
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Science
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Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.
-Mark Twain
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Secrets
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Everyone is like a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
-Mark Twain
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Self Respect
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The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.
-Mark Twain
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Sex
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The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. During twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle -- yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.
-Mark Twain
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Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board. It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence. Among the best bred, these two arts are now indulged only in private--- though by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo on the fundamental sigh.
-Mark Twain, Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism, speech delivered to the Stomach Club, a society of American writers and artists, Paris, 1879
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Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go to any length for it-risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.
-Mark Twain
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Silence
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The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.
-Mark Twain
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Slavery
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The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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Smile
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Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
-Mark Twain
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Society
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In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon-keeper occupied the same level of society, and it was the highest.
-Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1872
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Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
-Mark Twain
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Speeches (oratory)
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If you have nothing to say, say nothing.
-Mark Twain
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There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.
-Mark Twain
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Statistics
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There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
-Mark Twain
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Success & Failure
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All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.
-Mark Twain
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Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
-Mark Twain
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We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it's what he descends to that shames the human race.
-Mark Twain
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There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.
-Mark Twain
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When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.
-Mark Twain
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Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.
-Mark Twain
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Superiority
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There it is: it doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on! somebody to hold in light esteem, somebody to be indifferent about.
-Mark Twain
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Superstition
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Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.
-Mark Twain
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Sympathy
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Pity is for living, envy is for dead.
-Mark Twain
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Taxation
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I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.
-Mark Twain
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I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.
-Mark Twain
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Teaching
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To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble.
-Mark Twain
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Technology
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If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.
-Mark Twain, A majestic literary fossil. In: Twain M. The
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Temptation
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It is easier to stay out than get out.
-Mark Twain
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Thought
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Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.
-Mark Twain
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We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.
-Mark Twain
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Thunderstorms
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Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
-Mark Twain, letter, August 28, 1908
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Training
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A man can seldom -- very, very, seldom -- fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.
-Mark Twain
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Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing, but cabbage with a college education.
-Mark Twain
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Travel
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You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.
-Mark Twain
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I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
-Mark Twain
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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
-Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad conclusion, 1869
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Truth
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If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
-Mark Twain
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Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
-Mark Twain
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Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
-Mark Twain
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I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
-Mark Twain
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Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
-Mark Twain
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Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.
-Mark Twain
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No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.
-Mark Twain
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Vanity
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There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
-Mark Twain
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Virtue
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I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.
-Mark Twain
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Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.
-Mark Twain
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Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
-Mark Twain
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Walking
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The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.
-Mark Twain
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War
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O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief... for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
-Mark Twain
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Weather
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If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.
-Mark Twain
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Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
-Mark Twain
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Wisdom
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A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be lead by the nose.
-Mark Twain
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Women
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I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.
-Mark Twain
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Words
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The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
-Mark Twain
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I don't give a damn for man that can spell a word only one way.
-Mark Twain
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An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.
-Mark Twain
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A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words... the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
-Mark Twain
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The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
-Mark Twain
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Work
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Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.
-Mark Twain
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Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.
-Mark Twain
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Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.
-Mark Twain
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I do not like work even when someone else does it.
-Mark Twain
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Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
-Mark Twain
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Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
-Mark Twain
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World
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Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
-Mark Twain
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Youth
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It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.
-Mark Twain
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Books by and about Mark Twain
