Mark Twain: Frasi in inglese (pagina 24)

“…a professor in one of the great female colleges. That odious form is common, and I submit and use it, though it offends me as much as it would to say female brickbat or female snow-storm or female geography.”

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Mark Twain

Origine: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 273

“Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.”

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Mark Twain

p. 69 http://books.google.com/books?id=HXQKAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA69 of Vol. II of The Complete and Authoritative Edition, 2013, University of California Press
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)

“I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”

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Mark Twain

American Claimant (1892)

“I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, "All right, then, I'll GO to hell."”

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Mark Twain libro Le avventure di Huckleberry Finn

Origine: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 31

“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.”

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Mark Twain

Letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore (February 7, 1907)

“Citizenship? We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last refuge of the scoundrel -- and I believe that he was right. I remember when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country.”

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True Citizenship at the Children's Theater 1907

“These facts are all on the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is a good and orderly citizen. Summed up, they certify that he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crimes and brutal dispositions; that his family life is commendable; that he is not a burden upon public charities; that he is not a beggar; that in benevolence he is above the reach of competition. These are the very quintessentials of good citizenship.”

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Mark Twain libro Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

“Everybody yelled at him, and laughed at him, and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now, because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on."”

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Mark Twain libro Le avventure di Huckleberry Finn

Origine: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 21

“The bicycle had what is called the 'wabbles', and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. Against nature, but not against the laws of nature.”

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Mark Twain

"Taming the Bicycle" (1917)

“Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane—but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a man, it is evidence that you are a lunatic.”

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"A New Crime", first published as "The New Crime" in the Buffalo Express, 16 April 1870. Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old‎ http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ (1875).

“Not a single right is indestructible: a new might can at any time abolish it, hence, man possesses not a single permanent right.
God is Might (and He is shifty, malicious, and uncertain).”

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Mark Twain

Origine: Mark Twain's Notebook (1935), p. 394.

“Persons who think there is no such thing as luck—good or bad—are entitled to their opinion, although I think they ought to be shot for it.”

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Mark Twain

Origine: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 380

“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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Mark Twain

Letter to Gertrude Natkin, 2 March 1906 http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/53b4cf90-7739-0132-f12c-58d385a7b928

“The 'bus is English. When that is said, all is said. As a rule, any English thing is nineteen times as strong and twenty-three times as heavy as it needs to be. The 'bus fills these requirements.”

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Mark Twain

Origine: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 111

“Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him--his brain--have made that tool singularly competent…”

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Mark Twain libro Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

“…[H]eaven for climate, Hell for society.”

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Mark Twain

Speech to the Acorn Society (1901)
also given as: "Heaven for climate, Hell for companionship." (unsourced)

“Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel.”

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"The Late Benjamin Franklin", The Galaxy, Vol. 10, No. 1, July 1870 http://books.google.com/books?id=2TIZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA139. Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old‎ http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ (1875)

“If she were drowning I would not look—but I would not pull her out. I would not be a party to that last and meanest unkindness, treachery to a would-be suicide. My sympathies have been with the suicides for many, many years. I am always glad when the suicide succeeds in his undertaking. I always feel a genuine pain in my heart, a genuine grief, a genuine pity, when some scoundrel stays the suicide's hand and compels him to continue his life.”

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Mark Twain

Origine: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), pp. 45–46

“I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian's inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business--in either straight business or the questionable sort.”

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Mark Twain libro Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

“Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.”

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Mark Twain libro The Innocents Abroad

Origine: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Ch. 27