H. L. Mencken Quotes
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[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
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It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
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We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
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For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.