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It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

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
Make
Preventing
Always
Repetition
Men
Worth
Impossible
History
Keep
Character
Repetitions
Trying
Repeating

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We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity.
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I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with the blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.
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Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.
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The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.
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It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
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A marriage. . .will give a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, and a new mystery to life.
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Tough times teach trust.
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Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.
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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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Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether. A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
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There's some human instinct which makes a man treasure what he is not to make any use of, because everybody does not possess it.
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Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.
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The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
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Always obey your parents - when they are present.
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It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
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How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.
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I don't mind what the opposition say of me so long as they don't tell the truth about me. But when they descend to telling the truth about me I consider that this is taking an unfair advantage.
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Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.
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A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.
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We have to keep our God placated with prayer, and even then we are never sure of him-how much higher and finer is the Indian's God...Our illogical God is all-powerful in name, but impotent in fact the Great Spirit is not all-powerful, but does the very best he can for his injun and does it free of charge
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