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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Chief
Chiefs
Worth
Books
Reading
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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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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 clichés.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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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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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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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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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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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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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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