“No man of sound information, at the time [1885] Nietzsche planned The Antichrist, actually believed that the world was created in seven days, or that its fauna was once overwhelmed by a flood as a penalty for the sins of man, or that Noah saved the boa constrictor, the prairie dog and the pediculus capitis [head lice] by taking a pair of each into the ark, or that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, or that a fragment of the ‘true cross’ could cure hydrophobia. Such notions, still almost universally prevalent in Christendom a century before, were now confined to the great body of ignorant and credulous men—that is, to ninety-five or ninety-six percent. of the race.”

— Henry Mencken (1920), “Introduction” to Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ (pg. 6-7)

“I know that the sunrise is an optical illusion. My teacher told me so.”

— Henry Mencken (1925), attributed; said by E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly), of the Baltimore Herald, patterned after Mencken (Ѻ), in: Inherent in the Wind (1960), the film remake of the Scopes Monkey Trail, in response to query as to "why he bothers" (Ѻ), him and his newspaper, dealing with this religious legal trickery

“The cosmogony of the Jews, as recorded in Genesis, was mainly borrowed from the Babylonians. According to A. H. Sayce, the creation myth that it embodies arose at Eridu, a town on the Persian Gulf. Here, he says in the Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ‘the land was constantly growing through disposition of silt, and the belief consequently arose that the earth had originated in the same way. The water of the great deep accordingly came to be regarded as the primordial element out of which the universe was generated. The deep was identified with the Persian Gulf, which was conceived as encircling the earth’.”

“Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.”

— Henry Mencken (1930), Treatise on the Gods

“Morality is doing right no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right.”

— Henry Mencken (c.1930) (Ѻ)

“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.”

— Henry Mencken (c.1930)

“One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.”

— Henry Mencken (c.1930) [2]

“Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I’ll walk up to god in a manly way and say, sir, I made an honest mistake.”

— Henry Mencken (c.1930)

“The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.”

— Henry Mencken (c.1930)

“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.”

— Henry Mencken (c.1930)