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A tax is a fine for doing well, a fine is a tax for doing wrong.

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
Wrong
Funny
Wells
Well
Taxes
Fine

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I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.
Mark Twain
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Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.
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When congress is in session no American is safe.
Mark Twain
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It is curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing, nickel-plated word has for you.
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I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can't be made to do it in any possible way.
Mark Twain
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Music is a good thing and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.
Mark Twain
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Between us, we cover all knowledge he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.
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Every man has a secret ambition: To outsmart horses, fish and women.
Mark Twain
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Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more.
Mark Twain
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Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.
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Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.
Mark Twain
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God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
Mark Twain
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There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre.
Mark Twain
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We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes
Mark Twain
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The lightning there is peculiar it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether-Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.
Mark Twain
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There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par.
Mark Twain
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You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.
Mark Twain
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It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.
Mark Twain
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What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.
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Germany, the diseased world's bathhouse.
Mark Twain