Quote

I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schoisched with a step peculiar to myself - and the kangaroo.

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
Grace
Dress
Kangaroos
Party
Evening
Sumptuous
Lasts
Dresses
Longed
Last
Dancing
Graces
Born
Private
Attended
Like
Dance
Butterfly
Aired
Step
Peculiar
Kangaroo
Steps
Parties
Beau

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Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.
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The community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.
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There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
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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.
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I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
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Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.
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The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind at heart and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.
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To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
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Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
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The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
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Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.
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It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
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The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.
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Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
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To be great, truly great, you have to be the kind of person who makes the others around you great.
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Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on.
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More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.
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When one has tasted watermelon he knows what the angels eat.
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