H.L. Mencken Quotes
What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.
The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.
The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.
Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.
Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.
The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect.
The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
