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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
H. L. Mencken -
The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
H. L. Mencken
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As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes care of those who have been so fortunate as to come into the world foolish. Expressing skepticism that adventure does not necessarily contribute to scientific knowledge.
H. L. Mencken -
New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
H. L. Mencken -
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.
H. L. Mencken -
The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
H. L. Mencken -
If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
H. L. Mencken -
The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy; he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
H. L. Mencken
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
H. L. Mencken -
One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
H. L. Mencken -
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.
H. L. Mencken -
Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
H. L. Mencken -
The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum - the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth.
H. L. Mencken -
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken -
Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
H. L. Mencken -
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.
H. L. Mencken -
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
H. L. Mencken -
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.
H. L. Mencken -
A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
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Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
H. L. Mencken -
The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!
H. L. Mencken -
The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
H. L. Mencken -
It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
H. L. Mencken