Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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NUDITY

I judge that the first thing a statue dug up in the Campagna does is to go shopping & buy an offensive & obscene fig leaf. Imagine him cheapening the article at the counter & contriving how to take the innocence out of his nakedness & make the latter most offensive & conspicuous. Animals with fig leaf under tail. - Notebook #17, Oct. 1878 - Feb. 1879 So it is not nakedness that gives the sense of immodesty, the modifying the nakedness is what does it. - omitted passage from A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Vol. 2 (DV 4, MTP)

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