Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility." by H. L. Mencken

Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

H. L. Mencken

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And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

children school thinking

All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.

song food beautiful

Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.

government law years

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

gratitude freedom thankful

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

freedom men ideas

I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides. On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual cl... by H. L. Mencken

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

philosophical intellectual philosophy

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

honest democracy politics

What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

effort political believe

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the m... by H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

majority-rule running art

For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a... by H. L. Mencken

For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.

ill would-be house

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

marriage husband giving

Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.

tissues pressure believe

Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy.. a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose.

hypocrite struggle men

Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people. by H. L. Mencken

Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.

cynical idiot people

Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.

unionism quality use

When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.

The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

desert belief rights

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.

ridiculous democracy character