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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

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
Thinking
Atheism
Courage
Veneration
Hold
Atheistic
Clear
Fundamentally
Religion
Fairness
Truth
Opposed
Everything
Atheist
Love
Honesty

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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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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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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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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.
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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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