Quote

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.

H. L. Mencken

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Absurd
Accept
Scholars
Accepting
Genesis
Hell
Wholly
School
Scholar
Book
Threatened
Even
Sunday
Make
Nonsense

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
H. L. Mencken
Image
As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
H. L. Mencken
Image
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
H. L. Mencken
Image
No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
H. L. Mencken