H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally
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The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.
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The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
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The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
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All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.
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By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.
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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.