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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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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 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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What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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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 true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse
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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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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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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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