"Faith is believing something you know ain't true."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Following the Equator / 1897)
"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast"
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Reflections on Religion / 1906)
"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is -- in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree -- it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime -- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Reflections on Religion / 1906)
"Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / in Mark Twain: A Biography, of Albert Bigelow Paine / 1912)
"O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it..."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / The War Prayer)
"[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Mark Twain and the Bible)
"Man is a marvelous curiosity ... he thinks he is the Creator's pet ... he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Letters from the Earth)
"The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 /A Tramp Abroad)
"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Notebook)
"There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Notebook / 1898)
"One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Notebook)
"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Autobiography / 1959)
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / in The "Wit and Wisdom, of Mark Twain of Alex Ayres / 1987)
"Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion –- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910 / Letters from the Earth)
"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910)
"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910)
"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910)
"There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910)
""In God We Trust." I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910)
"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910)
"[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies."
(Mark Twain / 1835-1910)
