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A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

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
Able
Enlarge
Must
Convey
Would
Historian
Otherwise
Reader
Lying
Often
Truth

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We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than Heredity Privilege.
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We need not worry so much about what man descends from it's what he descends to that shames the human race.
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You can't throw too much style into a miracle.
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All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.
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My land, the power of training! Of influence! Of education! It can bring a body up to believe anything.
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in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
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God cures and the doctor sends the bill.
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The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless punctilios and pronounce his name right.
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You can't pray a lie -- I found that out.
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Behold, the fool saith, Put not all thine eggs in the one basket - which is but a matter of saying, Scatter your money and your attention but the wise man saith, Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET. - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
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The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
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Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
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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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A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
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If I were going to construct a God I would furnish him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present One lacks... He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.
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It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
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Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.
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I've never let my school interfere with my education.
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I hope all of us may eventually be together in everlasting peace and bliss -- except the inventor of the # telephone .
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Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.
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