H. L. Mencken Quotes
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
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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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The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
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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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Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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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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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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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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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.
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Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.
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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
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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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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
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For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.