H. L. Mencken Quotes

I'm in my dream world.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.

Mom thinks I live in this dream world where everybody's Ivana Trump.

The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things [witches and witchcraft] are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe.

Every generation lives with illusions.

Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.

Fantasies are not always what people think they are.

If men were but to read the New Testament with the same tone and emphasis, with which they do other books, and were to keep out of mind the idea of its being sacred, they would be disgusted with the credulity, and the want of intellect, reason and judgment, that is apparent in it.

I had these kind of unrealistic expectations that were fueled by romantic comedies, and it has both helped me and hurt me in many ways. It helped me because, in general, they've made me hopeful. I just figure things will eventually work out for me. But nobody is like any Tom Hanks character. Nobody is Hugh Grant. No one is Meg Ryan!

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.

I think religion is a mistake - I'm exhausted by its self-righteousness. I think atheists should start screaming for attention like religious folks do.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.

I don't think people should confuse fantasy and reality because no one is perfect - we all know that.

It is inadmissible that systems of ideas like religions, which have held so considerable a place in history, and to which, in all times, men have come to receive the energy which they must have to live, should be made up of a tissue of illusions.

You know, I wanted to get married, and so I - but I, you know, I realize no matter what you want, it's kind of a fantasy.

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

Dreams are illusions, and we can't let go of them because we would be dead.

For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.