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There are two things nobody should ever have to watch being made, sausage and laws.

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
Watches
Watch
Nobody
Law
Two
Ever
Made
Sausage
Things
Laws

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Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned
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Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
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There is this trouble about special providences namely, there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to be the beneficiary. In the case of the children, the bears, and the prophet, the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, because they got the children.
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If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, As unhappy as God.
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Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.
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It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.
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Among other common lies, we have the silent lie - the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.
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The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities.
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Homely truth is unpalatable.
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Independence-is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.
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Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.
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A habit cannot be tossed out the window it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.
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The sole impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs.... It is our only spur, our whip, our goad, our impelling power we have no other.
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Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
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All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.
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But it warn't no time to be sentimentering.
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Don't go to sleep, so many people die there.
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Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.
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A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain.
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If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.
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