Quote

There is no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from our steeples.

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
Sounds
Steeples
Fair
Pretext
Issues
Dreadful
Church
Consequently
Sound
Usual
Family
Sunday
America
Clock
Without
Fairs
Medley

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The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.
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Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
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It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.
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Never do wrong when people are looking.
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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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The only people who should use the possessive 'we' are kings, newspaper editors, and persons with tapeworms.
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Your friends may love you in private but your enemies will hate you in public.
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Thanksgiving Day - Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.
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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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Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak -- like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support -- something that ought to be arrested.
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I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.
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If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape? No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love.
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You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure--because he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhapsbut otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.
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I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
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In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere they date from it.
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A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
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It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.
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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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I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.
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I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
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