Some of these quotes are selected from _Minority Report,
      H. L. Mencken's Notebooks_,  Knopf, 1956. These have
      numbers in square brackets corresponding to the numbers
      in the book.

      Words or phrases bracketed with the underline symbol
      `_' were italicized in the original.

      Use your browser's `find' or `search' tools to jump to keywords.

EDUCATION

[43] The effort to educate the uneducable is hopeless. Schools for
adults soon become kindergartens for adults. The pupils are quite
unable to take in the education proper to their years. The gogues thus
have to provide them with amusement, just as children of four are
provided with amusement in kindergartens. The hope is that they will
somehow learn to think as an accidental by-product of playing, but that
hope is vain.
 
[51] The average American college fails...to achieve its ostensible ends.
One failure...of the colleges lies in their apparent incompetence to
select and train a sufficient body of intelligent teachers. Their choice
is commonly limited to second-raters, for a man who really knows a
subject is seldom content to spend his lifetime teaching it: he wants
to function in a more active and satisfying way, as all other living
organisms want to function. There are, of course, occasional exceptions
to this rule, but they are very rare, and none of them are to be found
in the average college. The pedagogues there incarcerated are all
inferior men--men who really know very little about the things they
pretend to teach, and are too stupid or too indolent to acquire more.
Being taught by them is roughly like being dosed in illness by third-
year medical students.
 
The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is
and always must be...next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an
intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?
 
        -- _New York Evening Mail_, 23 Jan. 1918.
 
[181] Consider [the pedagogue] in his highest incarnation: the
university professor. What is his function?  Simply to pass on to fresh
generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is
fragmentary, unimportant, and, in large part, untrue. His whole
professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and
avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers,
nail manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he
offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud
without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons.
 
[92] John Milton, in his famous "Tractate of Education," laid stress upon
the need to purge the young of infantile and adolescent concerns and
concentrate their attention upon the ideas and interests of maturity.
Any adequate education, he argued, must so influence them that "they
may dispose and scorn all their childish and ill-taught qualities to
deal with manly and liberal exercises."  It must be manifest that the
over-accentuation of athletics in American colleges works powerfully
against this transformation. It is impossible to think of games among
young men and women save as reversions to an earlier stage of growth.
A really intelligent educational policy would try to discourage the
taste for them, just as it tries to discourage the taste for making mud-
pies.
 
[25] The essential difficulty of pedagogy lies in the impossibility of
inducing a sufficiency of superior men and women to become
pedagogues. Children, and especially boys, have sharp eyes for the
weaknesses of the adults set over them. It is impossible to make boys
take seriously the teaching of men they hold in contempt.
 
[161] ...When the American pedagogue became a professional, and began
to acquire a huge armamentarium of technic, the trade of teaching
declined, for only inferior men were willing to undergo a long training
in obvious balderdash.
 
[174]  Of all the classes of men, I dislike most those who make their
livings by talking--actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so
on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor
who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who
sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the
applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic
to mere rhetoric.
 
[186] College football would be much more interesting if the faculty
played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the
trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs
and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to
humanity.
 
The honorary degree is a way of honoring a pompous ass. No honest
person would accept a degree he hadn't worked for. Honorary degrees
are suitable only for realtors, chiropractors and presidents of the
United States.
 
      -- [Quoted by Alistair Cooke in a speech before the National
      Press Club, Oct 8, 1986.]

MENCKEN QUOTES ON OTHER SUBJECTS
 
[168] ...I suppose that the inferiority of the teachers of [English] is
largely due to the fact that they are recruited from the lower moiety
of pedagogical aspirants. The more ambitious fellows tackle something
that seems more recondite, and hence better worth knowing. A
prospective teacher of biology, say, or mathematics, or physics, cannot
outfit himself for his career by reading a few plays of Shakespeare,
memorizing the rules of grammar laid down by idiots, and learning to
pronounce _either_ as if it were spelled _eyether;_ he must apply
himself to a vast mass of strange and difficult facts, and mastering
them requires a kind of capacity that is not common. The stupider
fellow turns to something that is easier and more obvious, which is to
say, to the language that every "educated" man is presumed to know,
and the books he is presumed to have read...
 
But in English even the higher ranks of professors tend to be inferior
to those of any other faculty. The papers printed in [the journals]
seldom show any professional competence or contribute anything worth
knowing to the subject. For the most part they consist wholly of dull
pedantries--attempts to establish the dates of some forgotten poet,
investigations of the stealings of one obscure author from another,
elaborate statistical inquiries into weak endings, and so on and so
on. The standards of professional research and writings in the United
States are anything but high, but it would certainly be unusual to find
any similar rubbish in a journal of chemistry, astronomy or zoology, or
even in a medical journal. The men who actually know something always
know the difference between something and nothing, but the professors
of English seem to be largely unaware of it. ...they devote themselves
ardently to irrelevant trivia about the writers of the past, many of
them existing today only as flies embalmed in the amber of text-books.
 
[173]  All the leaders of groups tend to be frauds. If they were not, it
would be impossible for them to retain the allegiance of their dupes...
 
[32] The taste for gambling, like that for sports, is a kind of feeble-
mindedness--maybe even an insanity. It can be justified only by a
resort to the most preposterous sophistry. Whenever it has seized a
man of any visible talent--for example, Dostoevsky and C. C. Colton--
he has ended crazy. It is the silliest of all the vices.
 
[44] All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense
means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further
from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his
plentiful _lack_ of common sense: he believes things on evidence that
is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non
sequiturs. Common sense really involves making full use of _all_ the
demonstrable evidence--and of nothing _but_ the demonstrable
evidence.
 
[45] The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is
yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he
granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a
snake.
 
[48] One of the strangest delusions of the Western mind is to the effect
that a philosophy of profound wisdom is on tap in the East. I have read
a great many expositions of it, some by native sages and the rest by
Western enthusiasts, but I have found nothing in it save nonsense. It
is, fundamentally, a moony transcendentalism almost as absurd as that
of Emerson, Alcott and company. It bears no sort of relation to the
known facts, and is full of assumptions and hypotheses that every
intelligent man must laugh at. In its practical effects it seems to be
as lacking in sense and as inimical to human dignity as Methodism, or
even Mormonism...
 
The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless
than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know
of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea
formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd
still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the
Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western
thought has been theosophy--and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian
Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man.
 
[57] Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that
all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that
he also usually proves that he is one himself.
 
[67] The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be
vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most
esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the
dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of
metaphysics.
 
[71] There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some
who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey
or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating
of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
 
[74] Astronomers and physicists, dealing habitually with objects and
quantities far beyond the reach of the senses, even with the aid of the
most powerful aids that ingenuity has been able to devise, tend almost
inevitably to fall into the ways of thinking of men dealing with objects
and quantities that do not exist at all, e.g., theologians and
metaphysicians. Thus their speculations tend almost inevitably to
depart from the field of true science, which is that of precise
observation, and to become mere soaring in the empyrean. The process
works backward, too. That is to say, their reports of what they pretend
actually to _see_ are often very unreliable. It is thus no wonder that,
of all men of science, they are the most given to flirting with theology.
Nor is it remarkable that, in the popular belief, most astronomers end
by losing their minds.
 
[78] The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is
no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong
probability that yours is a fake.
 
[79] It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and
omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of
gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the
board of a corporation that is losing money.
 
[118] ...The only really respectable Protestants are the
Fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots...
 
[125] 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...
 
[181] What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world?
Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them
from an imaginary hell. It is a business almost indistinguishable from
that of a seller of snake-oil for rheumatism.
 
[205] I am one of the few _Goyim_ who have ever actually tackled the
Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and
noble work, worthy of hard study by all other _Goyim._ Unhappily, my
report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few
bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish. If, at its
highest, it is genuinely worth reading, then at its lowest it is on all
fours with the Koran, "Science and Health" and the Book of Mormon.
 
[232] The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always
made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off
altogether the piety absorbed with their mothers' milk. The theologians,
with no such dualism addling their wits, are smart enough to see that
the two things are implacably and eternally antagonistic, and that any
attempt to thrust them into one bag is bound to result in one
swallowing the other. The scientists who undertake this miscegenation
always end by succumbing to religion; after a Millikan has been
discoursing five minutes it becomes apparent that he is speaking in
the character of a Christian Sunday-school scholar, not of a scientist.
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given
idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the
essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and
immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the
progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of
Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the
Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and
thus lingers a good while behind the event. So far as I am aware even
the most liberal theologian of today still gags at scientific concepts
that were already commonplaces in my schooldays.
 
Thus such a thing as a truly enlightened Christian is hard to imagine.
Either he is enlightened or he is Christian, and the louder he protests
that he is for former the more apparent it becomes that he is really
the latter. A Catholic priest who devotes himself to seismology or some
other such safe science may become a competent technician and hence
a useful man, but it is ridiculous to call him a scientist so long as he
still believes in the virgin birth, the atonement or transubstantiation.
It is, to be sure, possible to imagine any of these dogmas being true,
but only at the cost of heaving all science overboard as rubbish. The
priest's reasons for believing in them is not only not scientific; it is
violently anti-scientific. Here he is exactly on all fours with a
believer in fortune-telling, Christian Science or chiropractic.
 
[239] It is never possible for a metaphysician to state his ideas in
plain English. Those ideas, with few exceptions, are inherently
nonsensical, and he is forced to formulate them in a vague and
unintelligible jargon. Of late some of the stars of the faculty have
taken to putting them into mathematical formulae. They thus become
completely incomprehensible to the layman, and gain the additional
merit of being incomprehensible also to most other metaphysicians.
 
[248] Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. A man
really learns little by it, for it is narrowly limited in range. What does
a faithful husband know of women, or a faithful wife of men?  The
generalizations of such persons are always inaccurate. What really
teaches man is not experiences, but observation. It is observation that
enables him to make use of the vastly greater experience of other men,
of men taken in the mass. He learns by noting what happens to them.
Confined to what happens to himself, he labors eternally under an
insufficiency of data.
 
[252] Metaphysics is a refuge for men who have a strong desire to
appear learned and profound but have nothing worth hearing to say.
Their speculations have helped mankind hardly more than those of the
astrologers. What we regard as good in metaphysics is really
psychology: the rest is only blah. Ordinarily, it does not even produce
good phrases, but is dull and witless. The accumulated body of
philosophical speculation is hopelessly self-contradictory. It is not
a system at all, but simply a quarreling congeries of systems. The thing
that makes philosophers respected is not actually their profundity, but
simply their obscurity. They translate vague and dubious ideas into
high-sounding words, and their dupes assume, as they assume
themselves, that the resulting obfuscation is a contribution to
knowledge.
 
[260] Life on this earth is not only without rational significance, but
also apparently unintentional. The cosmic laws seem to have been set
going for some purpose quite unrelated to human existence. Man is thus
a sort of accidental by-product, as the sparks are an accidental by-
product of the horseshoe a blacksmith fashions on his anvil. The
sparks are far more brilliant than the horseshoe, but all the same they
remain essentially meaningless. They constitute, at best, a disease of
the horseshoe--they involve a destruction of its tissue. Perhaps life,
in the same way, is a disease of the cosmos.
 
[298] Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the
universe is still running it?  It is certainly perfectly conceivable
that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to
operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to
grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities,
and of all great newspapers.
 
[300] The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the
imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's
ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really
civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest
forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense.
It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of
logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.
 
[309] The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its
massive proof that God is a bore.
 
[311] The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the
mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no
longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that
prayer can cure after medicine fails.
 
[323] The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce
his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
 
[326] The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics
is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there
is no limit to oppression.
 
[330] Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both
commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never
developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia
really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations
between two gangs of frauds.
 
[333] Religion, of course, _does_ make some men better, and perhaps
even many men. There can be no doubt of it. But making them better by
filling their poor heads with grotesque nonsense is an irrational and
wasteful process, and the harm it does greatly outweighs the good. If
men could be made better--or even only happier--by teaching them that
two and two make five there would be plenty of fools to advocate that
method, but it would remain anti-social none the less. If the
theologians could only agree on their doctrines their unanimity might
have some evidential value, just as the agreement of all politicians
that the first duty of the citizen is to obey them and admire them has
some evidential value. It may not be true, but it is at least undisputed
by all save a small fraction of heretics, which is certainly something.
Fortunately for common sense, the theologians are never able to agree.
Even within the sects, and under the more rigid discipline, there is
constant wrangling, as, for example, between the Jesuits and the
Dominicans. Thus the cocksureness of one outfit is cancelled out by the
ribald denial of all the rest, and rational men are able to consign the
whole gang to statistics and the Devil.
 
[334] The so-called Philosophy of India has found its natural home in
Los Angeles, the capital of American idiots. Nowhere else, so far as I
know, is there any body of theosophists left, and nowhere else has
there ever been any substantial following for Yogi. All the quacks who
advertise to teach Yogi in twenty lessons for $2, and all the high
priests of the other varieties of Indian balderdash have their
headquarters in Los Angeles, which is also the Rome of the American
Rosicrucians.
 
[336] The theological argument by design, made popular in the English-
speaking countries by William Paley, is very far from convincing. The
creator it adumbrates shows only a limited intelligence compared to His
supposed masterpiece, man, and all save a few of His inventions are
inimical to life on earth rather than beneficial. There is nothing among
them that is at once as ingenious, as simple and as admirably adapted
to its uses as the wheel. I pass over the vastly more complicated
inventions of the modern era, many of them enormously superior to,
say, the mammalian heart. And I also pass over the relatively crude
contrivances of this Creator in the aesthetic field, wherein He has
been far surpassed by man, as, for example, for adroitness of design,
for complexity or for beauty, the sounds of an orchestra. Of the
irrationality and wastefulness of the whole natural process it is
hardly necessary to speak. Nothing made by man resembles it here, save
only government. It is hence no wonder that the overwhelming majority
of men, at all times and everywhere, have inclined toward the belief
that government is of divine origin.
 
[340]  The country high-schools of the United States no longer make
any pretense to rational teaching. Now that every yokel above the
intellectual level of an earthworm is run through them, their more
intelligent teachers give up in despair, for not more than a small
percentage of the pupils they face are really educable, at least beyond
the fifth-grade level. The average curriculum shows a smaller and
smaller admixture of rational instruction, and is made up more and more
of simple time-killers. The high-school, in its earlier form of the
academy, was a hard and even harsh school, but it actually taught a
great deal. But in its modern form it is hardly more than a banal
aggregation of social clubs. Every student of any pretensions belongs
to a dozen--imitation fraternities, bands and orchestras, athletic
teams, and so on. The most salient pupil, next to the champion athlete,
is the female drum-major, proudly showing her legs, making the most of
her budding breasts, and even offering the spectators a very good idea
of the lines and foliage of her pudenda. The State universities are
commonly required by law to take in, sight unseen, the graduates of
these burlesque institutions of learning. As a result, they go downhill
rapidly, and many of them are already burlesques themselves. As the
student body increases in quantity it declines correspondingly in
quality.
 
[343] The theory behind representative government is that superior
men--or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and
integrity--are chosen to manage the public business, and that they
carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is
little support for that theory in the known facts...
 
[344] Every contribution to human progress on record has been made by
some individual who differed sharply from the general, and was thus,
almost _ipso facto,_ superior to the general. Perhaps the palpably
insane must be excepted here, but I can think of no others. Such
exceptional individuals should be permitted, it sees to me, to enjoy
every advantage that goes with their superiority, even when enjoying
it deprives the general. They alone are of any significance to history.
The rest are as negligible as the race of cockroaches, who have gone
unchanged for a million years...
 
[350] Who are A's betters?  They are all persons whom he envies, and
with whom he would willingly change places. The essence of the
superior man is that he is free of such envy. Conscious of his capacity
to survive and prosper within his own field, he has no desire to change
places with anyone else, and hence he is incapable of envying anyone
else. Thus he is inevitably a bad democrat, for democracy is a practical
matter is based mainly and perhaps almost wholly on envy.
 
[357] ...Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible
by an appeal to the unintelligible.
 
[362] No more than one man in ten, at least in the United States, is
really a master of the trade he practises. The rest take money for
doing what they are quite incompetent to do, and thus live by false
pretenses...
 
[364] Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the
unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
Why is the so-called science of sociology, as ardent young college
professors expound it, such an imbecility?  Why is a large part of
economics?  Why does politics always elude the classifiers and
theorizers?  Why do fashions in metaphysics change almost as often as
fashions in women's hats?   Simply because the unknowable casts its
black shadows across all these fields--simply because the professors
attempt to label and pigeon-hole phenomena that are as elusive and
intangible as the way of a man with a maid.
 
[366] The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is
one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over
by the Devil.
 
[371] Metaphysics is the child of theology, and shows all the family
stigmata. Both are based upon the theory that there is some mysterious
magic in the unintelligible. Believing in it is thus an act of faith,
lying precisely within the definition of faith by Paul in Hebrews XI, 1.
This idea that there is something creditable about embracing nonsense
is at the bottom of the vulgar idea that religion is a necessary part
of the outfit of a decent man. It appears also on putatively higher
levels, and is the hallmark of the whole race of so-called
philosophers...
 
[373] It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men
good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion
is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance.
Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no
one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The
defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The
theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every
now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their
whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical
religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued
in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they
are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus
proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and
just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part
of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which
multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and
against God.
 
[380] One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern
society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be
respected. ...[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with
their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of
common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity
is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift
them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and
often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in
theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not
many of them are even honest.
 
[382] No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever
the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it
is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.
 
[388] Despite all the current gabble about curved space and other such
phantasms, it is much easier to think of the universe as infinite than
to think of it as having metes and bounds. If we try to think of it as
finite we must somehow conjure up a region of sheer nothingness
beyond its limits, and that is a feat I defy anyone to undertake. The
human mind, in fact, simply cannot grasp the concept of nothingness.
All we know of the universe tends to prove that it is unlimited, and the
more we learn about it the more that impression is confirmed. Am I here,
perhaps citing a subjective reason to support an objective fact?  Well,
why not?  What other reasons are there?  We can examine the universe
only through our senses, and our senses tell us that it spreads
infinitely in all directions. By senses, of course, I do not mean the
unaided senses of a child; I mean the enormously reinforced senses of
a man of science. His telescope magnifies the evidence of his eyes, but
what it tells him must still be recorded by his two optic nerves.
 
As for me, I refuse to waste thought upon a structure that
apparently has no limits in either time or space. The human mind can
imagine it, but that is as far as anyone can go. Our ordinary thinking
constantly assumes temporal and spatial boundaries; indeed, we always
think of objects and phenomena in terms of duration and extension. But
there is no sign of either in the universe. We must either accept it as
infinite, or stop thinking about it altogether. Any effort to put bounds
to it, as for instance that of Einstein and his followers, leads quickly
to plain absurdity. Curved space explains nothing whatsoever: it simply
begs the question. Nor is there any genuine illumination in the general
doctrine of relativity. It only says what every man of any sense knew
before--that time and space are not absolute values, but only relative.
 
[389] Man's limitations are also visible in his gods. Yahveh seems to
have had His hands full with the Devil from the start. His plans for
Adam and Eve went to pot, and He failed again with Noah. His worst
failure came when He sent His only-begotten Son into the world to
rescue man from sin. It would be hard to imagine any scheme falling
further from success.
 
[395] Christianity, for all its wounds, is not likely to die; even its
forms will not die; the forms, indeed will preserve what remains of the
substance. Of all religions ever devised by man, it is the one that
offers the most for the least money to the average man of our time.
This man may be very briefly described. He had enough education to
make him view all religions somewhat critically, to make him competent
to weight and estimate them, particularly in terms of their capacity to
meet his own problems--but not enough to analyze the concepts
underlying them. Such an analysis leads inevitably to agnosticism; a
man who once reaches the point of examining religions as psychological
phenomena, without regard to the ostensible authority, always ends by
rejecting all of them. But the average man is incapable of any such
examination, and his incapacity not only safeguards his religion but
also emphasizes his need of it. He must have _some_ answer to the
maddening riddle of existence, and, being unable to work out a logical
or evidential answer, he is thrown back upon a mystical answer.
 
This mystical answer is religion. It is a transcendental solace in the
presence of the intolerable. It is a stupendous begging of questions
that nevertheless disposes of them. Of all such answers Christianity
is at once the simplest and the most reassuring. It is protean and
elastic; it has infinite varieties; it has comfort both for the man
revolting despairingly against reason or congenitally incapable of
reason, and for the man whose capacity for reason stops just short of
intelligence. It is, at its best, a profound inner experience, a kind of
poetry that is lived--call it Catholicism. It is, at its worst, a game of
supernatural politics--call it Methodism. But in either case it
organizes and gives a meaning to life. In either case it soothes the
man who is too weak to stand up single-handed against the eternal and
intolerable mysteries.
 
[402] It is one of the Christian delusions that Christianity brought
charity into the world. It did not such thing. There were plenty of
agencies for taking care of the poor and helpless long before
Christianity was heard of, and even before Judaism. Both Christianity
and Judaism have converted charity into a sort of pious racket. The
alms-giver, in return for a trifling expenditure on this earth, will be
rewarded with an infinity of bliss post-mortem. This purely selfish
note is struck with great clarity by Judaism, and only less clearly by
Christianity. It appears also in the other religions of the East. Thus
religion has not really promoted charity, but debased it.
 
[404] The trouble with the theologians is that they are very adroit
logicians, and so usually prove too much. If the existence of man
proves that of God, on the commonly stated ground that every effect
must have a cause, then the existence of God equally proves the
existence of some super-God, and so on _ad infinitum._ Theologians
have made many efforts to meet this dilemma, but never with success.
They have been quite unable to imagine a power creating itself, just as
all the rest of us have been unable to imagine it. They pretend
otherwise, but their pretense is quite transparent.
 
[405] The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that
the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well
to teach it is usually unwilling to do so. There are, of course,
exceptions, but they tend to be confined to the higher levels, where
even the most aloof savant may usually be prevailed on to take a few
apprentices. His motive may be bad--in the average case, in fact, it is
simply a desire to get some free helpers in his own work--but
nevertheless he commonly makes a more or less diligent effort to
instruct his pupils, if only because it increases their value to him,
and he would be disgraced to have ignoramuses claim him as their
master. But on the lower levels [of education] the average teacher
really knows little about the thing he presumes to teach; he is simply
a pedagogue. In the public schools, in fact, and also in the private
schools, it is common to shift him from one subject to another, though
they may lie miles apart, or to load him with two or three more that
have nothing in common. Savages order this business better. The
teaching of the young, in most tribes, in handed over to the leading
men thereof. They are not pedagogues at all, in the civilized sense;
they are rather men who happen to know. It may be objected that what
they teach is mainly a series of customs and superstitions that have
no support in the overt facts, but to that two answers may be made. The
first is that these customs and superstitions, whatever their objective
dubiousness, at least have validity and value for the young of the
tribe, and the second is that the schoolteachers of civilization seldom
inculcate any ideas that are clearly more rational.
 
[412] Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts
pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact. The so-
called philosophers who still survive in the world (just as fortune-
tellers and witch-doctors survive) argue that a scientist cannot carry
on his business without some grounding in metaphysical theory, but for
this there is no evidence whatsoever; on the contrary, the career of
almost any competent scientist proves that it is false. All the
metaphysical equipment he really needs in contained in common sense,
and he shares it with carpenters and bricklayers. Whenever he steps
beyond it he gets into difficulties, and very often he comes
dramatically to grief. Some of the great glories of science, including
many who have adorned the non-physical sciences, have been as
innocent of metaphysical theory as so many police lieutenants. The
business of a man of science in this world is not to speculate and
dogmatize, but to demonstrate. To be sure, he sometimes needs the aid
of hypothesis, but hypothesis, at best, is only a pragmatic stop-gap,
made use of transiently because all the necessary facts are not yet
known. The appearance of a new one in contempt of it destroys it
instantly. At its most plausible and useful it simply represents an
attempt to push common sense an inch or two over the borders of the
known. At its worst it is only idle speculation, and no more respectable
than the soaring of metaphysicians.
 
[418] Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. 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."
 
[427] Obviously, some sort of force keeps the universe spinning, and in
the absence of any knowledge whatsoever as to its character it is not
unnatural for multitudes of men to think of it as a kind of
intelligence. This easy animism is congenital in mankind, and it will
probably be many centuries before even the most enlightened men throw
it off altogether. But if we try to think of the prime mover of the
universe as an intelligence, we are quickly brought up by evidence
that it must be a very inferior intelligence. In many ways, indeed, it
shows marked inferiority to man, presumably its creature. It has a
certain cleverness, but no as much as he has. Its designs are inferior,
and its execution is clumsy, wasteful and not infrequently
preposterous. If it has any moral sense, then that moral sense must be
represented by something closely approaching a vacuum. Any man who
was so completely brutal would be looked upon with horror by all other
men.
 
[431] The religious man, starting out with an outfit of irrational
postulates and untenable hopes, tries to fit them into the facts of a
harshly material world. In the process he must do violence to both.
They can never march together; indeed they are intrinsically
irreconcilable. A common way out of the dilemma is the resort to
mysticism, which is simply an attempt to construct a non-Euclidean
world in which anything that can be imagined is assumed to have
happened.
 
MENCKEN QUOTES FROM VARIOUS SOURCES
 
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
 
      -- [Quoted in Omni, August, 1988]
 
My private prejudices are innumerable, and often idiotic.
 
      -- [Quoted in Fitzpatrick, Vincent, _H. L. Mencken_. Reviewed in the
      Laissez Faire Books catalog, May 1990, p. 32.]
 
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
 
      -- [Quoted in Omni, August, 1988]
 
The typical lawmaker of today is a man devoid of principle--a mere
counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could
be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy,
astrology, or cannibalism.
 
      -- [Quoted in Galt, John (pseud.)  _Dreams Come Due_. Reviewed in
      the Laissez Faire Books catalog, May 1990, p. 17.]
 
RELIGION
 
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live
is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
 
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense
and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful
and his children smart.
 
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced
into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.
 
The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because
it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries--as
a matter of fact it was vastly less reasonable than many of them--but
because it was far more poetical.
 
Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most
obvious realities.
 
Religions, like castles, sunsets and women, never reach their maximum
of beauty until they are touched by decay.
 
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is his stupen-
dous capacity for believing the incredible.
 
The truth that survives is the lie that it is pleasantest to believe.
 
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in
Hell.
 
Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil
conscience of their parents.
 
What I got in Sunday-School... was simply a firm conviction that the
Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God
preposterous... The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems
to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling
before a Being, who, if He really exists, deserves to be denounced
rather than respected.
 
Morality: The theory that every human act must be either right or
wrong.
 
Theology: An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms
of the not worth knowing.
 
I see little evidence in this world of the so-called goodness of God. On
the contrary, it seems to me that, on the strength of His daily acts, He
must be set down a most stupid, cruel and villainous fellow.
 
      -- [Quoted in Durant, _On the meaning of Life_, p. 34)
 
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But
there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
 
      -- Minority Report, 1956.
 
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
 
The only way to reconcile science and religion is to create something
which isn't science or something which isn't religion.
 
Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is
opposed to every other form of rational thinking.
 
MISCELLANEOUS
 
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know
that you would lie if you were in his place.
 
_Critical note_.--Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for
so-called constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is
a hollow and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed,
should he prove it?  Is he judge, jury, prosecuting officer, hangman?
He proves enough, indeed, when he proves by his blasphemy that this
or that idol is defectively convincing--that at least _one_ visitor to
the shrine is left full of doubts. The fact is enormously significant; it
indicates that instinct has somehow risen superior to the shallowness
of logic, the refuge of fools. The pedant and the priest have always
been the most expert of logicians--and the most diligent disseminators
of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the human mind has never
been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by
gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went
roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that
doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was finite in
his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand
syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more
intelligent.
 
      -- The American Mercury. p. 75.