Mark Twain

Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Don’t tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

If we could get all religions together on a common purpose-the elimination of jealousies and the things that make men covet another’s belongings, we would be a long way toward the goal of outmoding war, depression and poverty.

Be the witness of your thoughts. You are what observes, not what you observe.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

As I reminded my girls, these aren’t problems. These are very high class problems. Because of where Barack and I come from, we just couldn’t sympathize with their… It was like, ‘Girl, you live in the White House. You do not get to complain about this.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

Inspiring others towards happiness brings you happiness.

Do not worship me, I am not God. I’m only a man. I worship Jesus Christ.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

The greatest impurity is ignorance. Free yourself from it. Be pure.

God almighty first planted a garden: and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasure.

A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.