H.L. Mencken Quotes
He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with - even if he drank.
Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.
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.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
No matter how happily a woman may be married it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.
If after I depart this vale you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself.
Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy.
Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn't they'd be married too.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
One cannot enter a State legislature or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a dubious character.
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.
Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
Morality and honor are not to be confused. "The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.
