Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the… — 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