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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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Books by and about Mark Twain