“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

— Mark Twain

Draft manuscript (c.1881), quoted by Albert Bigelow Paine in Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), p. 724 http://books.google.com/books?id=2UYLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA724#v=onepage&q&f=false
Variant: Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

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American author and humorist 1835–1910

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