A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same… — 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