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Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Fraud
Invites
Dread
Truth
Examination
Falsehood

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Those who attempt nothing themselves think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.
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Attainment is followed by neglect, possession by disgust, and the malicious remark of the Greek epigrammatist on marriage may be applied to many another course of life, that its two days of happiness are the first and the last
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A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.
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To a poet nothing can be useless.
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Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.
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Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.
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I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to he right.
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We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
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No man should attempt to teach others what he has never learned himself
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Commerce can never be at a stop while one man wants what another can supply and credit will never be denied, while it is likely to be repaid with profit.
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It seems to be remarkable that death increases our veneration for the good, and extenuates our hatred for the bad.
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Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy.
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Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.
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Idleness and timidity often despair without being overcome, and forbear attempts for fear of being defeated and we may promote the invigoration of faint endeavors, by showing what has already been performed.
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I am a friend to subordination, as most conducive to the happiness of society. There is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed.
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And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.
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Politeness is fictitious benevolence.
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People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.
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Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life.
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Suspicion is very often a useless pain.
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