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The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples - that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.
Mark Twain -
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Mark Twain
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The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'
Mark Twain -
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain -
When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
Mark Twain -
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others.
Mark Twain -
Appendix D, The Awful German Language
Mark Twain -
They spell it 'Vinci' and pronounce it 'Vinchy'. Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.
Mark Twain
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When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
Mark Twain -
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
Mark Twain -
How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before.
Mark Twain -
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
Mark Twain -
Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.
Mark Twain -
He is now rising from affluence to poverty.
Mark Twain
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James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.
Mark Twain -
Herodotus says, 'Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.'
Mark Twain -
George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
Mark Twain -
The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.
Mark Twain -
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain -
'We consciously or unconsciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbor’s pitch and preserving his approval than we do to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to it that they are right and sound.
Mark Twain
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Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
Mark Twain -
It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred, and so, not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren of the knowledge.
Mark Twain -
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 -
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
Mark Twain