H. L. Mencken World Quotations

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

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

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate.

The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.

Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the whole world has very little liking. He is always unpopular.

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.

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 true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.

As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes care of those who have been so fortunate as to come into the world foolish. Expressing skepticism that adventure does not necessarily contribute to scientific knowledge.

If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world