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If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.

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
Oil
Stones
Constitution
Law
Free
May
Believe
Gall
Men
Conditioned

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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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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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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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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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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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