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Every man is his own hell.

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
Hell
Literature
Every

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The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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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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The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
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The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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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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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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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.
H. L. Mencken