Henry Mencken

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

The essence of a self-reliant and autonomous culture is an unshakeable egoism.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.

Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

We must repsect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

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

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

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.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

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.

Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them.

Every government is a scoundrel.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.