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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
Truth
Able
Enlarge
Must
Convey
Would
Historian
Otherwise
Reader
Lying
Often

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The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.
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I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.
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There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled.
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And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows
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There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory
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In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night.
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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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Etiquette requires us to admire the human race.
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He gossips habitually he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue.
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Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.
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The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.
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I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
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It's an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
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We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and it's efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read-
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It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.
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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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In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.
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I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.
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Congress: America's only true criminal class.
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