Quote

When an audience does not complain, it is a compliment, and when it does, it is a compliment, too, if unaccompanied by violence.

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
Unaccompanied
Complain
Compliment
Complaining
Violence
Audience
Doe

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The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.
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Travel is lethal to prejudice.
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The human being places sexual intercourse above all other joys, but leaves it out of his heaven.
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Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity.
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Benefit of clergy: Half-rate on the railroad.
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We had an abundance of mangoes, papaias and bananas here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It has a soft pulp, like a pawpaw, and is eaten with a spoon.
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Tell me about a person's family, friends, and community, and I'll tell you what his opinions are.
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I always did hate for anyone to know what my plans or hopes or prospects were—for, if I kept people in ignorance in these matters, no one could be disappointed but myself, if they were not realized.
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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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I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.
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Grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religion they were brought up in.
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If God had meant for us to be naked, we'd have been born that way.
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You are a coward when you even seem to have backed down from a thing you openly set out to do
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Education is what remains when what is learned has been taken away.
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The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
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The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
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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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Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate.
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I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.
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Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.
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