H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis Menckenwas a German-American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. As a scholar Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. His satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth12 September 1880
CountryUnited States of America
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.
Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.