H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
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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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Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
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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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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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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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Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
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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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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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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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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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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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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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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.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.