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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

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
Agnostic
Purely
Satisfying
Absolutely
Almost
Professing
Faith
Agnosticism
Without
Trusts
Ecstatic

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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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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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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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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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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
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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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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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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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