H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
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.
-
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
-
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
-
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
-
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
-
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.
-
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
-
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
-
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
-
Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
-
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
-
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
-
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
-
The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances-of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.
-
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
-
The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
-
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
-
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
-
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
-
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies - the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
-
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
-
This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.