H. L. Mencken Quotes

Truth is so often disconcerting.

What I do is create a lens through my work that corrects my readers' cognitive dissonance and says: you will see all of it - not what you want or what makes you comfortable, but all of it. And you will not erase what displeases you.

Having our fundamental assumptions about life challenged is never a comfortable thing.

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

You know the problem, we don't want to believe what we know.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

No one wants to hear the truth if it isn't what they want to hear.

I love discordancy. It makes people ill at ease and wakes up a part of their brain that's normally asleep.

There are certain persons for whom pure Truth is a poison.

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

We live in a world of denial, and we don't know what the truth is anymore.

Truth is, in fact, an elusive concept. It depends almost entirely on where you are standing at the time. It is a human instinct to confuse belief with truth.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

Truth is an illusory notion.

As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.

Truth is scary. Truth has bad breath at times

Nothing makes a man, or a body of men, as mad as the truth. If there is no truth in it, they laugh it off.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It...makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded....Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.

The truth is a bully we all pretend to like

The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

Most of us seldom take the trouble to think. It is a troublesome and fatiguing process and often leads to uncomfortable conclusions. But crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.

I find it dull when my heart meets my mind