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I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

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
Believe
Everybody
Reading
Read
Paradise
Lost
Classic
Ever
Poetry
Book
Nobody
Take
Trust
Something
Wants

More quotes by Mark Twain

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If you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Mark Twain
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The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.
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It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.
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It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
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A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.
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Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
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There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled.
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Those who do not read the news are uninformed. Those who do are misinformed.
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Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot and there ain't any real difference between triplets and a insurrection. - The Babies speech 1879
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More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.
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Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
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The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
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Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
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It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.
Mark Twain
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I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way.
Mark Twain
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But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
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While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.
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Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.
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France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.
Mark Twain