Quotes from H. L. Mencken

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.

Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.

Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.

The worshiper is the father of the gods.

Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.

A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.

There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.

There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic legend.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse

Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

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