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» Quotes by H. L. Mencken »
A bore is simply a nonentity who resents his humble lot in life, and s...
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven b...
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffi...
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but aft...
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
Marriage
A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four,...
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever hear...
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the ...
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both e...
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, e...
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thou...
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil ...
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quo...
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admi...
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cab...
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attai...
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'...
Marriage
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of pro...
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be look...
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ...
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by J...
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Ar...
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey...
Government
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, an...
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the ca...
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hois...
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence ...
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in term...
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, an...
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong...
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds huma...
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christ...
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search ...
He slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Ne...
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
History
Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to...
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty ...
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it i...
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it...
I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that...
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and ...
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common...
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply bec...
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and functi...
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he woul...
If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots hims...
Marriage
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier ...
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to...
Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world be...
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankf...
Politics
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.
It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few de...
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended...
It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know th...
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiard...
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnip...
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor...
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors...
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a re...
Religion
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
History
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do mig...
Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
Life is a dead-end street.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is imposs...
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
Love
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
Love
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Love
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking...
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born ...
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an ...
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marr...
Marriage
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wr...
Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and ...
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no tr...
No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an ide...
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than...
Marriage
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to...
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the averag...
No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intell...
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American publi...
Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the...
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job...
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudi...
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball i...
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b...
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come bac...
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month b...
Marriage
Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but ...
Life
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly gr...
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in...
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of sland...
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latt...
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist, Jack.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpa...
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to thi...
The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. Th...
The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doing...
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age br...
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the un...
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it w...
The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled...
The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys...
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of...
The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that h...
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge ...
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (a...
Politics
The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics i...
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not w...
There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
There is always an easy solution to every...problem - neat, plausible,...
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
Time stays, we go.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to...
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it...
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolu...
Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying...
Politics
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out t...
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with la...
Peace
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is m...
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
We must respect the other fellow's religion,but only in the sense and ...
Religion
Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year t...
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, th...
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are g...
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sig...
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of...