H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
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Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.
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Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.
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Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
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Men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
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I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.
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A Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.
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The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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Criticism is prejudice made plausible.