H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
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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.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
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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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A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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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 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.
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Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
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In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
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Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.