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I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.

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
Verge
Angel
Happened
Never
Life

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This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back - I get glimpses of them in the mirror - and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.
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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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Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.
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A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
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Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange for tastes are made, not born. I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head and say, 'Where's your haggis?' and the Fijan would sigh and say, 'Where's your missionary?'
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The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods. It remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime. It is no more entitled to respect than is the flag of a pirate.
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No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.
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Be good and you will be lonely.
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Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.
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What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows - it must grow nothing can prevent it.
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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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There is only one good sex. The female one.
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There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones it can lift men to angelship.
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Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.
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Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
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Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal.
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Humor is like a frog if you dissect it, it dies.
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If you have nothing to say, say nothing.
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Among other common lies, we have the silent lie - the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.
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It is better to support schools than jails.
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