H. L. Mencken - The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908)

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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.

H. L. Mencken
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 it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

H. L. Mencken
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

H. L. Mencken
The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.

H. L. Mencken
Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.

H. L. Mencken
It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.

H. L. Mencken
The proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good.

H. L. Mencken