H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.
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On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
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The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.
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Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.
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It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.
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Lawyer - One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.
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The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.
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The theory behind representative government is that superior men-or at least men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity-are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honest. There is little support for that theory in known facts.
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No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way.
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There is no record in the history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself.
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Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
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The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.