Quote #1
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
More from H. L. Mencken
- Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
- Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
- Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
- Explanations exist: they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible and wrong.
- Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of …
- It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for…
- School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
- Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.