Top 936 Quotes & Sayings by H. L. Mencken - Page 16

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech.... A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.

This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high attainments in their specialties-for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and Osler-men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard them stated.

I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.

Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.

I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.

Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.

Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.

The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes - that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects - this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once - and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.

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.

The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.

I roll out of my couch every morning with the more agreeable expectations.

The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.

The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular.

In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse

One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.

[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.

If I ever mary, it will be on a suddn impulse - as aman shoots himself

Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.

Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.

Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man

The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.

Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.