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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In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.
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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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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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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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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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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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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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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
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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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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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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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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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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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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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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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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
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In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.