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The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

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
People
Insane
Tried
Materials
Hold
Building
Asylums
Funny
Insanity
Running
Sane
Way
Shut

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I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the lower animals (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.
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Thanksgiving day. Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks now, but the turkeys.
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I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.
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The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it.
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You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure--because he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhapsbut otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.
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Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.
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A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.
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I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.
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Education is what you must acquire without any interference from your schooling.
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My sister...was an interested and zealous invalid during sixty-five years, tried all the new diseases as fast as they came out, and always enjoyed the newest one more than any that went before my brother had accumulated forty-two brands of Christianity before he was called away.
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Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
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If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.
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The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
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The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
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In India, 'cold weather' is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.
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Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.
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Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
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An open mind leaves a chance for someone to drop a worthwhile thought in it.
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When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.
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I have not professionally dealt in truth. Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there.
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