The burnt child shuns the fire. Until next day.
- Mark Twain

The Christian Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes. For eighteen hundred years these changes were slight - scarcely noticeable. The practice was allopathic - allopathic in its rudest and crudest form. The dull and ignorant physician day and night, and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast and hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store's stock; he bled him, cupped him, purged him, puked him, salivated him, never gave his system a chance to rally, nor nature a chance to help. He kept him religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day during all that time. The stock in the store was made up of about equal portions of baleful and debilitating poisons, and healing and comforting medicines; but the practice of the time confined the physician to the use of the former; by consequence, he could only damage his patient, and that is what he did.
- Mark Twain

The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time.
- Mark Twain

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

The church 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 doesn't 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.
- Mark Twain

The English are mentioned in the Bible: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
- Mark Twain

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
- Mark Twain

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
- Mark Twain

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole life - time, if not asked to lend money.
- Mark Twain

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
- Mark Twain