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I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

Mark Twain

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Mark Twain
Age: 74 †
Born: 1835
Born: November 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 21
Aphorist
Author
Autobiographer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Teacher
Florida
Missouri
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel L. Clemens
Samuel Clemens
Life
Ceased
Knocking
Seldom
Opportunity
Able

More quotes by Mark Twain

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Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth
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We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.
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Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
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Man is without doubt the most interesting fool there is. He concedes that God made the angels immune from pain and death, and that he could have been similarly kind to man, but denies that he was under any moral obligation to do so.
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Circumstance - which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final and must be obeyed by all - and will be
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Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
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Had double chins all the way down to his stomach.
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A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart.
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The lightning there is peculiar it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether-Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.
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The reason most people don't go to church is because they've already been.
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In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
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God could create the world in six days because he didn't have to make it compatible with the previous version. Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company
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We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.
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I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble.
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in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
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When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible.
Mark Twain
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The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
Mark Twain
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In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
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My books are like water those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
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Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.
Mark Twain