Quote

There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.

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
Feelings
Civilized
Inquisition
Great
Beast
Finer
People
Wild
Barbarians
Civilization
Beasts
Difference
Stirring
Differences
Feeding
System
Parties
Party
Enlightened
Degraded

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Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.
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There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
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A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is just about as inspiring.
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The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work.
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Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
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We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and it's efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read-
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Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one.
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There is nothing so annoying as to have two people talking when you're busy interrupting.
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An occultation of Venus is not half so difficult as an eclipse of the sun, but because it comes seldom the world thinks it's a grand thing.
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My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.
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You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it.
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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
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Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
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By trampling upon the helpless abroad with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.
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I do not allow my schooling to interfere with my education
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The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.
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Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
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It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
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The first time a student realizes that a little learning is a dangerous thing is when he brings home a poor report card.
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Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.
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