H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
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Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
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The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.
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The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
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The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
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Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
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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.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.