H. L. Mencken Quotes About Knowledge

• I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

  H. L. Mencken

  Inspirational, Nature, Truth

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

• We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

  H. L. Mencken

  Inspirational, Drinking, Knowledge

  "A Mencken chrestomathy". Book by Henry Louis Mencken, 1949.

• [The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

  H. L. Mencken

  Knowledge, Independent, Science

• Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Believe, Knowledge

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.363, Knopf

• The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

  H. L. Mencken

  Truth, Learning, Knowledge

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

• I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.

  H. L. Mencken

  Teacher, Determination, School

  H. L. Mencken (2009). “Prejudices: Third Series”, p.260, Cosimo, Inc.

• By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

  H. L. Mencken

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

• Only to often on meeting scientific men, even those of genuine distiction, one finds that they are dull fellows and very stupid. They know one thing to excess; they know nothing else. Pursuing facts too doggedly and unimaginatively, they miss all the charming things that are not facts. ... Too much learning, like too little learning, is an unpleasant and dangerous thing.

  H. L. Mencken

  Stupid, Knowledge, Science

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