Quotes by H.L. Mencken

The Same as it Ever Was

 

“True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. . . . They are free to shoot back. But they can’t disarm their enemy.”

“The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion.”

“By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds…of evangelists?”

“Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.”

“Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”

“”Let us trust in God, who has always fooled us in the past.”

“It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true.”

“The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government.”

Namasté
नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

07/18/2020