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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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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
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To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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