H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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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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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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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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[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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For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
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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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[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
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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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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
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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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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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Here is tragedy-and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
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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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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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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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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 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.
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Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.
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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.