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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.

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
Accounts
Religion
Nothing
Framed
Hypothesis
Account

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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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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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The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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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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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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