The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic legend. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what… — 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… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes - that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and… — 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