H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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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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No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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Jury - A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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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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Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
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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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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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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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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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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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It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
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We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. ... The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard them from the consequences of their vices.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.