Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said… — 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
[Science] must be amoral by its very nature: The minute it begins separating facts into the two categories of good ones and… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be… — 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 truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Only to often on meeting scientific men, even those of genuine distiction, one finds that they are dull fellows and very stupid.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks… — 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