H.L. Mencken

"No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not."

"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it."

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

"The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."

"In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms."

"The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians."

"If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder."

"You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something."

"The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

"Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull."

"The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable."

"The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable."

"The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable."

"The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens."