Mark Twain Religion Quotations

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain

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

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

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.

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

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.

We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.

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

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.

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

Ignorance is not not knowin' - Ignorance is knowin' what ain't so.

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.

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.

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.

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

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.

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

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.