H.L. Mencken Quotes
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.
Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.
It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, and that the democratic government is at least as bad as any of the other forms.
At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard: women's, that when it is dead it stays dead.
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.
Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.
Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
