“Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.”

As ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.

Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.

You’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

I love America, but I don’t like it.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.

Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.

We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .

We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.

The question is: until reinforced, can we learn the ways of church mice.

Thereof I believe that no tribunal of any church has any power to make any decree of any force in the law of the land, other than to establish the status of its own communicants within its own church.

I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and equality of all churches, all sects and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor.

I believe in the absolute separation of church and state and in the strict enforcement of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise.

My ordination in the Church of God in Christ was at age 9, and I later became a Baptist minister, which I am today.

Do you remember the church across the sands? You stood outside and planned to travel the lands, where the pilgrims go.

I learned more stuff in church than I did in the world.