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Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
H.L. MENCKEN, as quoted in James A. Haught's 2000 Years of Disbelief
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H.L. MENCKEN, A Mencken Chrestomathy
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.
H.L. MENCKEN, A Mencken Chrestomathy
The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H.L. MENCKEN, Prejudices: Third Series
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.
H.L. MENCKEN, "Minority Report," Notebooks
The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.
H.L. MENCKEN, Baltimore Evening Sun, Sep. 14, 1925
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings.
H.L. MENCKEN, Treatise on the Gods
Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H.L. MENCKEN, quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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