This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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
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 |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
What the South really needs is fewer scrub bulls ? on the human level.
Will |
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.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
No man is ever too old to look at a woman, and no woman is ever too fat to hope that he will look.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
Will |
All well-ordered and modern states can only base themselves upon Courts of Justice and Conduct of Laws which are just, correct and geared towards the protection of the rights of individuals. Justice is a product of education.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
No government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction... governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. It?s one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
Evil | Man | Pleasure | Understanding |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
Will |
Clich‚s, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
Man by working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god - not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths.
Change |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.