Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

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.

Happy | Man |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

Better | Business | Man | Wise | Business |

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.

Man | Wise |

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.

Man | Wise |

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.

Good | Man |

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.

Man | Learn |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clich‚s. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

Man | Woman |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

Man |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.

Deeds | Man | Words | Deeds |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a good many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

Man |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.

Man | Will |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The state ? or, to make matters more concrete, the government ? consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can?t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting ?A? to satisfy ?B?. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods.

Man | Woman |

Hannah Whitall Smith

Sight is not faith, and hearing is not faith, neither is feeling faith; but believing when we neither see, hear nor feel is faith; and everywhere the Bible tells us our salvation is to be by faith. Therefore we must believe before we feel, and often against our feelings, if we would honor God by our faith.

Evil |

Hans Küng

However, if the religions in essence merely repeat statements from the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, such a Declaration becomes superfluous; an ethic is more than rights.

Man | Wise |

Hannah Arendt

Power corrupts... when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power... far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one.

Evil | Malice | Think |

Hannah Arendt

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

Man |