Henry Louis Mencken quote: "No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion"

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think becau...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the pr...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. B...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

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

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Adultery is the application of democracy to love
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nic...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The Liberals have many tails, and chase them all
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

If you want peace, work for justice.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Idealist: One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will als...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Bachelors know more about women than married men do. If they didn't, they'd be married too.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Going to school does not make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a ca...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

You can't kiss an oil well.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expe...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Remorse is regret that one waited so long to do it
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Belief in our mortality, the sense that we are eventually going to crack up and be extinguished like...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch the...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as s...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

All government, of course, is against liberty.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though sh...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other a...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had an...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing they marry later; for another thing they...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionarie...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The American people, taken one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, i...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adr...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from ad...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and mis...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite eas...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory t...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

[Rudolph Valentino was] what is commonly called for want of a better name, a gentleman. In brief, Va...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Men are sad because they have to die so soon, women are sad because they were born so long ago.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

An individual who forces himself to accept this or that idea, or who pretends to accept this or that...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scien...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a d...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Say what you want about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that th...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

He marries best who puts it off until it is too late
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Theology-An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Church: A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to people who will n...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a litt...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

When women kiss, it always reminds one of prizefighters shaking hands
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

He (the businessman) is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are wo...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

There is a bird that knows no closed season - and if he won't come down to Texas oil stock, or one-n...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

When women kiss it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every h...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid fo...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice s...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Gynecologists: perhaps the most ignorant class of men, when it comes to knowledge of women, in the c...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as ha...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

No normal man ever fell in love after 30 when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops the...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Men are the only animals who devote themselves assiduously to making one another unhappy.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

People will believe what they want to believe
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Change is not progress
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led t...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were i...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

School days are the unhappiest in the whole span if human existence. They are full of dull, unintell...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common hones...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Old age ain't no place for sissies.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A professional politician is a professionally dishonourable man. In order to get anywhere near high ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterili...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-c...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-hor...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christian...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to d...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better p...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most gratefully warmed...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for idea...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound c...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. W...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexpl...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

He uses his sources as a drunkard uses lampposts; not to light him upon his way, but to dissimulate ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice t...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American gospel tent, who pretends to k...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just afte...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is s...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothi...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average America...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

In order to teach chemistry or psychology or even history or Greek a man must actually know somethin...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things t...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Living with a dog is messy - like living with an idealist
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I have yet to meet (a socialist) who was not as gullible as a Mississippi darkey - nay, as a Mississ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of peop...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The average schoolmaster is, and always must be, an ass
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he so sorely...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save w...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian business...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

What ass first let lose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege? ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries fo...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is unc...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Many an American Congressman comes to Washington from a district attorney's office: you may be sure ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what m...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Do not overestimate the decency of the human race
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her hea...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and t...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

And out of each (schoolhouse) is vomited the standard product of the New Pedagogy - an endless proce...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Creator: a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

We must respect the other fellow's religion,but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect ...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many in...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

To expect defeat is nine-tenths of defeat itself.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventur...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

It is more blessed to give than receive; for example, wedding presents
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Painting is the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is opposed to every other form o...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and truth in...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, hone...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Love is like war; easy to begin but very hard to stop
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and great...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion

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Henry Louis Mencken

No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion

Henry Louis Mencken

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