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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Wise
Freedom
Free
Political
Giving
Made
Vote
Every
Christianity
Good
Democracy

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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.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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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.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
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