By the way, the origins of the saying are unclear, but H.L. Mencken popularized it. And since you're a fan of his, maybe you'll enjoy some of his other pearls of wisdom...
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.
The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.
The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
So, Whig, you still think the man knew what he was talking about?
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