H. L. Mencken

“Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.”

“Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy.”

“Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.”

“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 safeguarding bad work.”

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.”

“You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.”

“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to he...”

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any pub...”

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism bey...”

“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.”

“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.”

“It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denoun...”