Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

The Book of Mormon is chloroform in print

I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet-I am inclined to expect one.

I have only one moral precept; never smoke more than five cigars at a time.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it.

Nevertheless we have this curious spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination, and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself. It does seem as if we ought to be humble when we are at a bench-show, and not put on airs of intellectual superiority there.