H.L. Mencken Quotes
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.
A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
