Quote

When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

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
Hold
Library
Unprotected
Age
Delight
Censoring
Lying
Anger
Censored
Doesn
Bible
Delights
Around
Mines
Censorship
Book
Mine
Irony
Youth
Unconscious
Deep
Leaves
Expels

More quotes by Mark Twain

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Do one thing every day you don't want to do.
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There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
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The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty
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I will remark in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is hogwash
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July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so
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I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.
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Additional problems are the offspring of poor solutions.
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The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money's sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
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Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
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Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.
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Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress and some would lose all of it.
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Dying man couldn't make up his mind which place to go to-both have their advantages, heaven for the climate, hell for the company!
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A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.
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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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One holds a bottle of red wine by the neck, a woman by the waist, and a bottle of champagne by the derriere.
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None of us can be as great as God, but any of us can be as good.
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A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.
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To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.
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A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.
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All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.
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