Quotes by "H.L. Mencken"

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.