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Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

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
Sure
Customs
Sand
Punishment
Brings
Transgressed
Rock
Evaded
Laws
Escaped
Rocks
Openly
Law
Custom

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Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
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When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.
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For we were little Christian children and early learned the value of forbidden fruit.
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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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It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
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Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it.
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It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth.
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The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.
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Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows
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Nothing is made in vain, but the fly came near it.
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I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.
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To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.
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A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.
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No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.
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The laws of Nature take precedence of all human laws. The purpose of all human laws is one - to defeat the laws of Nature. This is the case among all the nations, both civilized and savage. It is a grotesquerie, but when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.
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