H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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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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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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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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No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
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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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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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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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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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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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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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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 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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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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Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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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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Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
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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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Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
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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 even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.