Quote

Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak -- like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support -- something that ought to be arrested.

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
Means
Foundation
Without
Anybody
Superstructure
Must
Built
Comprehensible
Mean
Humor
Arrested
Something
Building
Freak
Like
Ought
Visible
Support
Familiar
Upon
Merely

More quotes by Mark Twain

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But we are all insane, anyway ... The suicides seem to be the only sane people.
Mark Twain
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The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
Mark Twain
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There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.
Mark Twain
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Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
Mark Twain
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It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.
Mark Twain
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A little more kindness, A little less speed, A little more giving, A little less greed, A little more smile, A little less frown, A little less kicking, A man while he's down, A little more We, A little less I, A little more laugh, A little less cry, A little more flowers, On the pathway of life, And fewer on graves, At the end of the stri
Mark Twain
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For we were little Christian children and early learned the value of forbidden fruit.
Mark Twain
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But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie.
Mark Twain
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Frankenstein took some flesh and bones and blood and made a man out of them the man ran away and fell to raping and robbing and murdering everywhere, and Frankenstein was horrified and in despair, and said, I made him, without asking his consent, and it makes me responsible for every crime he commits. I am the criminal, he is innocent.
Mark Twain
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Experience comes from bad judgment.
Mark Twain
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There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.
Mark Twain
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God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.
Mark Twain
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Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick.
Mark Twain
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You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs.
Mark Twain
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There has been only one Christian. They caught and curcified him-early.
Mark Twain
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Don't dream your life, but live your dream
Mark Twain
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An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.
Mark Twain
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I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.
Mark Twain
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I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.
Mark Twain
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Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it.
Mark Twain