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The new political gospel: public office is private graft.

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
Graft
Gospel
Private
Office
Public
Politics
Political

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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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Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.
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How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again!
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Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
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When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.
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The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
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A friend is someone who stays in when the rest of the world has gone out.
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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.
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If all men were rich, all men would be poor.
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Drop this mean and sordid and selfish devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up something to do that's got some dignity to it! Risk your souls! Risk them in good causes then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform!
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Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane.
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Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for.
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I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases
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The highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor.
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When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.
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Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom.
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Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.
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No man, deep down in the privacy of his heart, has any considerable respect for himself.
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All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.
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