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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

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
Danger
Full
Botched
Dies
Intends
Process
Benign
Often
Interference
Nature
Dangers
Every
Obviously
Forgotten

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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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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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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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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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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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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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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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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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To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
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Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
H. L. Mencken