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The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.

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
Sharply
Instant
Reach
Heaven
Speak
Going

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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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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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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
H. L. Mencken