Mark Twain Quotes

I always like to associate with a lot of priests because it makes me understand anti-clerical things so well.

The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo.

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.

If you stick your head above the parapet and you have an opinion, and you spout family values and morality and all that, you'd be pretty naive to think that everybody would go, 'Oh, he's great, I love him.'

Why is the church always a taillight rather than a headlight?

A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.

The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

The Church is a system, - but whether it is as much founded on the teaching of our Lord, who was divine, as on the teaching of St. Paul, who was not divine, is a question to me of much perplexity.

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.

I despise followers of any kind, especially those who follow me.

Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.

The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers.

Society does not love its unmaskers.

Stop talking about the way things are, unless you like them.

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.

Laughter tends to mock the pompous and the pretentious; all man's boastful gadding about, all his pretty pomps, his hoary customs, his wornout creeds, changing the glitter of them into the dullest hue of lead.

Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.

By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached.

If the churches don't move, much of the community won't move. We've got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors.

A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room.

Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side

European Christianity has allowed itself to be intimately united with the powers of this world. Now that these powers are falling, it is as if it were buried under their ruins.

There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.

It's funny - people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and THEY go to CHURCH.