To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Every lynching deprives its victim of his life without due process of law, and denies him an equal protection of the law.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image