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The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

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
Right
Merely
Prerogative
Function
Orders
Politics
Patriot
Wrong
Obey
Political
Temporary
Order
Servant
Cannot
Decide
Government
Determine
Originate

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Humor is man's greatest blessing.
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How empty is theory in the presence of fact!
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Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so it is the sickening grammar that they use.
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It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing - I used to be a good boy.
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Some people bring joy wherever they go, and some people bring joy whenever they go.
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Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.
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The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter.
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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.
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This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.
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To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master.
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My own luck has been curious all my literary life I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
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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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I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.
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But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws, But get thee to a nunnery - go!
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A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditch digging.
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Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. When in doubt, tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
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Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
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Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.
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We like to read about rich people in the newspapers the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed.
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