Mark Twain 1835-1910

“I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.”

“"In God We Trust." It is the choicest compliment that has ever been paid us...I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.”

“Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

“Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.”

“Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.”

“Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.”

“There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practised in the tricks and delusions of oratory.”

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”

“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.”
[“Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself.”
    C. S. Peirce]

“Man is a 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.”

“Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."”

“A God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones...who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness...and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself...who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!”

“Prosperity is the best protector of principle.”

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.”

“There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.”

“Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

“There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind...”

“We began to stir against slavery. Hearts grew soft, here, there, and yonder. There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one--the pulpit. It yielded at last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession--at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery text remained; the practice changed, that was all.”

“During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch--the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything...There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

“Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.”

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it.”