H. L. Mencken Quotes

There are atheists and Christians, and there are people in both groups who are a little too heavy-handed.

If religious people deny paradise to their opponents or to 'non-believers,' atheists would likewise seek to eliminate 'dangerous' believers with their 'childish' ways and their heads in the clouds.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.

A good deal of the political battle of the future will be a conflict between religion and unbelief:

I'm against any religion, and Communism and Nazism - they're both equally religions. They're just replacement gods.

Any faith of more than 1.6 billion people is going to have some of them who falsely justify actions on that faith.

As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.

I personally am not religious. I think, put into the wrong hands, it's incredibly dangerous. It's the reason for most of the wars that have been fought around the world, and it's pretty ridiculous when you think about what they're actually arguing over.

I'm always having a crisis of faith, with everything. People who are certain are terrifying to me. That's how religious wars get started.

Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike.

Religion is all good, but we are almost back to medieval times now, where we are obsessed with going into religious wars and electing our politicians based on their religious statements.

It is evident that the fanatical interpretation of the Koran is incompatible with our values of freedom and with Christian values.

The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.

Needless to say, oftentimes a 'religion' is not needed to breed extremism. People breed it all by themselves, oftentimes with the subjective morality of modern secularism breeding the worst kind.

If I hadn't been raised in such a logical household, the entertainment industry would have elicited only one reaction from me in regards to 'Christians': 'Good God, these people are crazy.'

I like both antireligious and traditional Catholic imagery.

Religious extremism. We hear about it all the time. We see it all the time. Heck, most of us are just sick of talking about it all the time.

I really don't want to offend anybody, but I find all forms of religious fundamentalism frightening.

Religiosity is suffocating in Pakistan. It invariably stokes the fire in driving society to religious extremism.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it's a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you're an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you're religious, there's a mystery left there.

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there.

For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true. Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will. Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.

Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.