H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Lawyer - One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.
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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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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.
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One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.
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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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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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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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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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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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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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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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When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.
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The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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All of the American's foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings.
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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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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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Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
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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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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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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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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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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 only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.