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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.

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
Experts
Nonsense
Logicians
Logic
Pedant
Worse
Pedants
Always
Diligent
Priest
Expert
Priests

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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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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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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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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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Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
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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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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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