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.
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 even harder for the average ape to believe that man has descended from him
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Puritanism and fanatism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H L Mencken (1880-1956)
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