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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
Came
Opportunity
Desire
Together
Always
Hanging
Would
Escape
Integrity
Kill

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The Book of Mormon is chloroform in print
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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 my custom to keep on talking until I get the audience cowed.
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I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being-that is enough for me he can't be any worse.
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His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere.
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There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.
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Those who say truth is stranger than fiction have wasted their time on poorly written fiction.
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I never write metropolis for seven cents when I can write city and get paid the same.
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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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I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.
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We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
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The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.
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We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.
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The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
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