Quote

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

H. L. Mencken

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Contribution
Massive
Proof
Atheism
Protestantism
Religion
Bore
Thought
Bores
Human
Chief
Humans
Chiefs

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
H. L. Mencken
Image
Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H. L. Mencken
Image
What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
H. L. Mencken
Image
My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken
Image
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H. L. Mencken