H.L. Mencken
Quotes from H.L. Mencken
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the
occurrence of the improbable.... A man full of faith is simply
one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and
realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill."
"Puritanism- The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be
happy."
"The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how
human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think
they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for
gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true."
"The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by
dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead
cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways
of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was
safe--that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and
hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.
It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent."
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in
veneration- courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above
all, love of the truth."
"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."
"What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world?
Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save
them from an imaginary hell."
"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 the ride."
"Men become civilized not in proportion to their willingness
to believe but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."