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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

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
Folly
Mankind
Palpably
Belief
Follies
Religion
Costly
True
Passionately
Believe
Chief
Chiefs
Occupation

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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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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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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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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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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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