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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
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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Believe
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Belief
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
H. L. Mencken
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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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
H. L. Mencken
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
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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.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
H. L. Mencken
One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
H. L. Mencken
The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
H. L. Mencken
Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
H. L. Mencken
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.
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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
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
H. L. Mencken
