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One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one.

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
Assume
Assuming
Keep
Character
Firsts
First
Must
Earn

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A tax is a fine for doing well, a fine is a tax for doing wrong.
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Never miss an opportunity to shut up.
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The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race's steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit's way - the optimist's way.
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My own luck has been curious all my literary life I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
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Like most people, I often feel mean, and act accordingly.
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Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die.
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Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training the odds are too heavy.
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We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain.
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In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
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God could create the world in six days because he didn't have to make it compatible with the previous version. Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company
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All human rules are more or less idiotic.
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Marriage -- yes, it is the supreme felicity of life. I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when it comes.
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Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.
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Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by.
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Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
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No throne exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only businesswise-merely as retail differs from wholesale.
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