H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
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.
-
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
-
In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
-
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
-
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.
-
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
-
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
-
Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
-
Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
-
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
-
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.
-
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
-
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
-
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
-
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.
-
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
-
One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
-
A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
-
It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
-
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
-
That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.
-
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
-
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.
-
The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.