All Human Knowledge is Moonshine - H.L. Mencken

Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (1880 – 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, editor, satirist, critic of American life and culture, and a scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he was widely known for his attacks on America's Puritan tradition and its "booboisie".  He was, perhaps, the most influential writer of the first half of the twentieth century. His coverage of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" trial ridiculed defense attorney William Jennings Bryan for his "theologic bilge" and established him as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century and a curmudgeon and misanthrope of incalculable influence. 
Damn funny to boot.

Below is a selection of my favorite Menckenisms:

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

A Jury — A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

All men are frauds.  The only difference between them is that some admit it.  I myself deny it.

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

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.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically. the most devious and mediocre - the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a complete vacuum.  The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men.. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely the inner soul of the people. We move towards a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a complete moron. 

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

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 or chemistry.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

Nature abhors a moron.

Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. 

On Shakespeare: After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. 

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Self-respect is the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Sunday  — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex -- because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for shortcuts.  All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. 

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

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

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

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

Theology — An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

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.

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.

To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

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. 

4.1.13