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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place

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
Men
Feeling
Lying
Feelings
Makes
Place
Even
Believe
Would
Confidence

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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.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
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