H. L. Mencken Quotes
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? A: Why do men go to zoos?
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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How to Drink Like a Gentleman: The Things to Do and the Things Not To, as Learned in 30 Years' Extensive Research.
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Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
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It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right...The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.
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No man ever entered the White House under the burden of a more inconvenient past. And no President was ever denounced with greater ferocity. - said of Andrew Jackson
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Sunday - A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
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God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.