H. L. Mencken Quotes About Atheism

• Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

  H. L. Mencken

  Motivational, Religion, Atheism

• Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

  H. L. Mencken

  Atheist, Honesty, Thinking

• We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Respect, Religious

  Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

• I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Thinking, Religion

  "What I Believe". "The Forum", 84, (p. 139), September 1930.

• Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.

  H. L. Mencken

  Atheist, Honesty, Mistake

• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Faith, Freedom, Believe

  Prejudices, Third Series ch. 14 (1922)

• A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religion, Atheism, Might

• To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

  H. L. Mencken

  Wisdom, Men, Ideas

• Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Comedian, Democracy

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religious, Religion, Atheism

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.80, Vintage

• The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religion, Atheism, Proof

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.311, Knopf

• Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

  H. L. Mencken

  Atheist, Religion, Atheism

• Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fear, Men, Atheism

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.54, Knopf

• There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fear, Cutting, Men

• The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religious, War, Teaching

• All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

  H. L. Mencken

  Order, Religion, Atheism

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.89, Vintage

• The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum - the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth.

  H. L. Mencken

  Sacrifice, Men, Atheism

• The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, War, Men

• The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes - that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects - this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once - and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Ignorance, Origin Of Life

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Atheism, Facts, World

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.71, Vintage

• The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh.

  H. L. Mencken

  Long Ago, Atheism, Yahweh

• 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 instead of respected.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, School, Sunday

• Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

  H. L. Mencken

  Atheist, Home, Atheism

• Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Atheism, Female

• Here the only genuine conflict is between true believers. Of a given text in Holy Writ one faction may say this thing and another that, but both agree unreservedly that the text itself is impeccable, and neither in the midst of the most violent disputation would venture to accuse the other of doubt. To call a man a doubter in these parts is equal to accusing him of cannibalism. Even the infidel Scopes himself is not charged with any such infamy.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Doubt, Atheism

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