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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
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Knowing
Unknowable
Literature
Theologian
Term
Explaining
Theology
Explain
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Worth
Effort

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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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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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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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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.
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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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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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