H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
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For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.
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All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.
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A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.
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It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent
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The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
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No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.
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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
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[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.