H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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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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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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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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Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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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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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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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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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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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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[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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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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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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Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.
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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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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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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
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It is a politician's business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.