H. L. Mencken Quotes

Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment; it must stand or fall by its results.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

In October, 1838, … I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continuous observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization.

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

Natural selection operates according to immediate cirumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.

The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Nature is a series of murders.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Politics is applied biology.

The reason for natural selection's great success is that it provides a satisfying explanation of how evolution might have occurred: individual organisms vary, and if those variations are inherited, the successful ones will survive and propagate and pass down their desirable traits to succeeding generations.

Today the world is a big jungle.

Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.