Quotes
Henry Louis Mencken(1880 - 1956) writer and journalist U.S.A. |
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Quotations of Henry Louis Mencken
"The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride."(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956 / Prejudices: Third Series / 1917)
"The curse of man, and cause of nearly all of his woes, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956 / In Defense Of Women / 1918)
"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956 / A Mencken Chrestomathy / 1949)
"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956 / Minority Report / 1956)
"Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956 / Minority Report / 1956)
"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."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956 / Minority Report / 1956)
"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."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956 / Notebooks)
"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"(Metaphysicians are) men with no taste for exact facts, but only a desire to transcend and forget them as quickly as possible."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax in man."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake"
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)