H L Mencken Quotes

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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.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

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.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

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.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

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