Samuel Clemens
Quotes from Samuel Clemens
"I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning
bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in
Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her
soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth
full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide
the looking-glass."
"[The United States'] conversion came at last. 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."
"In Scotland the parson killed the witch after the magistrate
had pronounced her innocent; and when the merciful legislature
proposed to sweep the hideous laws against witches from the
statute book, it was the parson who came imploring, with tears and
imprecations, that they be suffered to stand."
"It does certainly seem to suggest that if man continues in
the direction of enlightenment, his religious practice may, in the
end, attain some semblance of human decency."
"The Bible is "a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology."
"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."
"Man is a Religious Animal. Man 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."