H. L. Mencken Quotes

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.

Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.

Monogamy, in brief, kills passion — and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man — the ideal civilized man — is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately — when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it.

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.