H. L. Mencken Quotes About Logic

• Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. .... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Talking, Class

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.174, 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

• The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Thinking, Long

• All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy.

  H. L. Mencken

  Character, Political, Presidential

• The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

  H. L. Mencken

  Experts, Pedants, Logic

  "Clinical Notes". "The American Mercury" Magazine, (p. 75), January 1924.

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