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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
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Henry Louis Mencken
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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
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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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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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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.
H. L. Mencken