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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

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
Religion
Immutable
Idea
Theology
Science
Truths
Given
Holds
Ideas
Abandon
Better
Essence
Always
Eternal
Willing

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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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