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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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CHRISTIANITY

Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence--stuffed and in a museum.
- Notebook, 1898

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, a Biography

 


AI image created by Barbara Schmidt

One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen under our observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity. The longest journey our Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem - about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles. The next longest was from here to Sidon - say about sixty or seventy miles. Instead of being wide apart - as American appreciation of distances would naturally suggest - the places made most particularly celebrated by the presence of Christ are nearly all right here in full view, and within cannon-shot of Capernaum. Leaving out two or three three short journeys of the Saviour, he spent his life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no larger than an ordinary county in the United States. It is as much as I can do to comprehend this stupefying fact.
- The Innocents Abroad

For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again--which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before.
- Letter to William D. Howells, 25 January 1900

I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass.
- "A Salutation from the 19th to the 20th Century," 31 December 1900

Patriotism is a high and holy thing. It will remain a high and holy thing, and jointly admirable and praiseworthy, Christianity will never change it. Its noble doctrine of universal brotherhood is for the angels, if for anybody -- it is not possible for men. Christianity cannot teach a fish to fly nor aliens to love each other. We can not even imagine a heaven where there are no frontiers -- where all foreigners -- including Satan's people -- are brothers, and Patriotism is a vice unknown. ... By the law of his religion a Christian must labor for the breaking down of all walls that interrupt the fusion of the race into a common brotherhood, and one of the most formidable of these is Patriotism; it marches with every frontier in the world.
- Notebook #32a, June 2 1897 - July 24, 1897; published in Mark Twain's Quarrel with Heaven, Ray B. Browne (1970).

There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him--early.
- Notebook, 1898

This is a Christian country. Why, so is hell. Inasmuch as "Strait is the way and narrow is the gate, and few-few-are they that enter in thereat" has had the natural effect of making hell the only really prominent Christian community in any of the worlds; but we don't brag of this and certainly it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be--a Christian.
- Mark Twain's Notebook

 

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