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To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.

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
Believes
Extent
Educated
Average
Believe
Genuinely
Things
Suspicious
People
Teaches
Citizen

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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
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