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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.

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
Heart
Vast
Secretly
Kind
Presence
Savage
Anxiety
Shrinks
Dare
Savages
Majority
Minority
Pitiless
Race
Minorities
Inflicting
Whether
Aggressive
Shrink
Pain
Civilized
Assert

More quotes by Mark Twain

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But old fools is the biggest fools there is.
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Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
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Too much is just enough.
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Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.
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Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
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I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
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In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.
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Learn from the mistakes of others - you won't live long enough to make them all yourself. He's opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer him the position.
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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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Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.
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Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes.
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Happiness ain't a thing in itself -it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.
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It has always been a peculiarity of the human race that it keeps two sets of morals in stock-the private and the real, and the public and the artificial.
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It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
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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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Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise
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Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.
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Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?
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I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry.
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Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.
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