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If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

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
Together
Always
Hanging
Would
Escape
Integrity
Kill
Came
Opportunity
Desire

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I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.
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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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At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass
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Behold, the fool saith, Put not all thine eggs in the one basket - which is but a matter of saying, Scatter your money and your attention but the wise man saith, Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET. - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
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The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.
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Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
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For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again - which I hope he will not do he made trouble enough before.
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Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
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Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.
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A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.
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Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.
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A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public
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Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.
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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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The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bills like everything.
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Too much is just enough.
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When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
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