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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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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 highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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