There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
Henry Louis Mencken Quotes
There are two kinds of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
In my title I revive the word ‘chrestomathy’ in its true sense of ‘a collection of choice passages from an author or authors.’… When this book was announced, some newspaper smarties protested that the word would be unfamiliar to many readers, as it was to them. Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives that have […]
All mammals, in truth, seem to have an inborn tendency to identify causation with volition. They are naturally pugnacious, and life to them consists largely of a search for something or someone to blame it on.
When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don’t want them to be falling ill of smallpox in our kitchens and stables, to the peril […]
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-by to the Bill of Rights.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
People will believe what they want to believe.
No man ever quite believes in any other man.
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking. I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the […]
