Mark Twain Quotes
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It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
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There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.
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Buy land, they're not making it anymore.
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Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
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Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
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Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
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The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
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It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us - dreamers and indolent... It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich - these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.
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In the cotton States, after the war...the Jew came down in force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the negro's wants on credit, and at the end of the season was proprietor of the negro's share of the present crop and of part of his share of the next one. Before long, the whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtful if the negro loved him.
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We are all alike, on the inside.
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Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
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...it seems to be a law of the human constitution that those that deserve shall not have, and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having. It is a sufficiently crazy arrangement, it seems to me.
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It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
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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.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.
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I can live for two months on a good compliment.
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What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
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We are always anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
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Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'
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Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
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The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.
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...when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are. Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least.
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The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.
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Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him that I hadn't any.