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A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.

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
Protector
Creator
Liberty
Freedom
Human
Humans
Irreverence
Discriminating

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If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.
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Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
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It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.
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All our acts, reasoned and unreasoned, are selfish
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What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
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Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
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Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. That is where the true evil lies.
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A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
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Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
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Shut the door not that it lets in the cold but that it lets out the coziness.
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Imagination labors best in distant fields.
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... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.
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Marriage -- yes, it is the supreme felicity of life. I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when it comes.
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I don't want my girl to be so skinny she can knife me with her knee.
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A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes when bad, he is entitled to none at all.
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Tea is an affront to lunch and an insult to dinner.
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There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre.
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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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You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.
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A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.
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