Mark Twain Religion Quotes & Sayings

In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters. — Mark Twain

Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion. — Mark Twain

It is said, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent upon him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not. — Mark Twain

I have a religion-but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor ... Perhaps your religion will sustain you,will feed you-I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect-neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck. — Mark Twain

Patriotism is merely a religion-love of country, worship of country, devotion to the country's flag and honor and welfare. — Mark Twain

The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. — Mark Twain

Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned — Mark Twain

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. — Mark Twain

Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best
to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history
but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian
not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with. — Mark Twain

He is in heaven now, and happy; or if not there, he bides in hell and is content; for in that place he will find neither abbot nor yet bishop. — Mark Twain

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's. — Mark Twain

[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. — Mark Twain

Any established church is an established crime, an established slave pen. — Mark Twain

No church property is taxed and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit. — Mark Twain

Blasphemy? No, it is not blashphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if he is as little as that, He is beneath it. — Mark Twain

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity. — Mark Twain

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory. The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, 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 spilled. — Mark Twain

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. — Mark Twain

A religion that comes of thought, and study, and deliberate conviction, sticks best. The revivalized convert who is scared in the direction of heaven because he sees hell yawn suddenly behind him, not only regains confidence when his scare is over, but is ashamed of himself for being scared, and often becomes more hopelessly and malignantly wicked than he was before. — Mark Twain

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed. — Mark Twain

Where is it written that if you don't like religion you are somehow disqualified from being a legitimate American? What was Mark Twain, a Russian? — Hendrik Hertzberg

Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it. — Mark Twain

More men go to church than want to. — Mark Twain

Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of. — Mark Twain

In light matters
matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things
he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat. — Mark Twain

India has two million gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire. — Mark Twain

Ignorance is not not knowin' - Ignorance is knowin' what ain't so. — Mark Twain

Why should I have to hide the fact that I don't believe there's a supreme being? There's no proof of it. There's no harm in saying you're an atheist. It doesn't mean you treat people any differently. I live by the Golden Rule to do unto others, as you'd want to be treated.
I just simply don't believe in religion, and I don't believe necessarily that there's a supreme being that watches over all of us. I follow the teachings of George Carlin. George said he worshipped the sun. He was a fellow atheist. I'm in good company ... Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Charles Darwin. It's not like I'm not with good company and intelligent people. There have been some good, intelligent atheists who have lived in the world. — Jesse Ventura

Grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religion they were brought up in. — Mark Twain

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born. — Mark Twain

We must have a religion - it goes without saying - but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition. That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel: it was only an opinion - my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn't worth any more than the pope's - or any less, for that matter. — Mark Twain

When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know. — Mark Twain

The Jabalites ... They worship no god; and if we in goodness of heart do send a missionary to show them the way of life, they listen with respect to all he hath to say, and then they eat him. This doth tend to hinder the spread of light. — Mark Twain

Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity? — Mark Twain

Italy is the home of art and swindling; home of religion and moral rottenness — Mark Twain

The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward. — Mark Twain

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks. — Mark Twain

Each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all - the rest, to a man, are fools and eluded. One man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows monarchy is best, the next one knows it isn't; one man knows high tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows there are witches, the next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only true one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know it isn't so. — Mark Twain

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's. — Mark Twain

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live. — Mark Twain

I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion. — Mark Twain

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself. — Mark Twain

Man is a 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 ... The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste. — Mark Twain

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient. — Mark Twain

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

Man is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight — Mark Twain

Mark Twain, cynical about so much else, has a particular reverence in the Holy Land for "sitting where a god has stood". What flabbergasted him was that his traveling companions would be in such a sanctified environment and winter what they saw according to other writers or their denominational background instead their own experience with the holy. — Mark Twain

Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion — Mark Twain

Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that. — Mark Twain

In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true. — Mark Twain

A Christian mother's first duty is to soil her child's mind, and she does not neglect it. Her lad grows up to be a missionary, and goes to the innocent savage and to the civilized Japanese, and soils their minds. Whereupon they adopt immodesty, they conceal their bodies, they stop bathing naked together. — Mark Twain

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool. — Mark Twain

Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt. — Mark Twain

In religion, India is the only millionaire ... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. — Mark Twain

In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them ... There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; ... she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery. — Mark Twain

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. — Mark Twain

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

Two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind - politics and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more. — Mark Twain

What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension. — Mark Twain

Strange is the man who practices his religion. — Mark Twain

We were good boys, good Presbyterian boys, and loyal and all that; anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold. — Mark Twain

As became a young sinner, Sam [Mark Twain] had a special interest in Satan. He asked his Sunday school teacher questions about Eve in the garden, wondering "if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber." Twain recalled, "He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension. — Fred Kaplan

Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought
by force of circumstances, not argument
to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them. — Mark Twain

Heaven is the very last place to come to rest and don't you be afraid to bet on that! — Mark Twain

So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code. — Mark Twain

I was educated, I was trained, I was a Presbyterian and I knew how these things are done. I knew that in Biblical times if a man committed a sin the extermination of the whole surrounding nation-cattle and all-was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after. — Mark Twain

The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey! — Mark Twain

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. — Steven Weinberg

To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master. — Mark Twain

What would the new teacher, representing France, teach us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about railroading. Steamshipping? No. France has no superiorities over us in that matter. Steamboating? No. French steamboating is still of Fulton's date
1809. Postal service? No. France is a back number there. Telegraphy? No, we taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No. Magazining? No, that is our own specialty. Government? No; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too variegated for our climate. Religion? No, not variegated enough for our climate. Morals? No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves. — Mark Twain

I do not know what we should do without the pulpit. We could better spare the sun-the moon, anyway. — Mark Twain