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Medicine has made all its progress during the past fifty years. ... How many operations that are now in use were known fifty years ago?-they were not operations, they were executions.

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
Science
Executions
Past
Execution
Many
Operations
Made
Fifty
Years
Medicine
Progress
Known
Use

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We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.
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When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence.
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Jesus died to save men - a small thing for an immortal to do - and didn't save many, anyway. But if he had been damned for the race, that would have been act of a size proper to a god, and would have saved the whole race.
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Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.
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But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness death was man’s best friend when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
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I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be even I cannot tell, myself.
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Many people have the reasoning facility, but no one uses it in religious matters.
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Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
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I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble.
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I admire him, I frankly confess it and when his time is come I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.
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Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.
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