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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.

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
Littles
Bother
Little
Catholic
Human
Indeed
Clergy
Humans
Argument
Plausible
Make
Intelligence
Superstitions
Respect
Arguments
Existence
Plain
Belief
Seldom

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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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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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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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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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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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