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We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

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
Conventions
Circumstances
Association
Seem
Customs
Strange
Strongest
Environment
Chains
Bonds
Struggle
Vain
Convention
Word
Training
Custom
Free
Circumstance
Seems
Beings

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The smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.
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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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A man may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands.
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The highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor.
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God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
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There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press
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Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.
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People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either being made.
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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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If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
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I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
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It is my custom to keep on talking until I get the audience cowed.
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Troubles are only mental it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them.
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Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.
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One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one.
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If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.
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