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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas

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
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Century
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Thirteenth

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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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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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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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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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The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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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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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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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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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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