This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The scientific impulse seems to me to be the very opposite of the religious impulse. When a man seeks knowledge he is trying to gain means of fighting his own way in the world, but when he prays he confesses that he is unable to do so. .... The feeling of abasement, of incapacity, is inseparable from the religious impulse, but against that feeling all exact knowledge makes war. The efficient man does not cry out "Save me, O God". On the contrary, he makes diligent efforts to save himself. But suppose he fails? Doesn't he throw himself, in the end, on the mercy of the gods? Not at all. He accepts his fate with philosophy, buoyed up by the consciousness that he has done his best. Irreligion, in a word, teaches men how to die with dignity, just as it teaches them how to live with dignity.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Monogamy, in brief, kills passion -- and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man -- the ideal civilized man -- is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately -- when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it.
Man |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-called liberals. They believe in each and every quack who sets up his booth on the fair-grounds, including the Communists. The Communists have some talents too, but they always fall short of believing in the liberals.
Man |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
Man |
Hafiz, pen name of Shams-ud-din Muhammad NULL
It is written on the gate of heaven: Nothing in existence is more powerful than destiny. And destiny brought you here, to this page, which is part of your ticket-as all things are-to return to God.
Man |
Here is our opportunity and our challenge. If the nuclear powers are prepared to declare a truce, let us seize the moment to strengthen the institutions and procedures which will serve as the means for the pacific settlement of disputes among men.
Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future?with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals?have a worse record to show in these "sciences" than in almost any scientific endeavor.
Man |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.
Man |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.
Man |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure.
Man |
Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland
No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.
Evil |
Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland
You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.