H. L. Mencken Quotes
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
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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 this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
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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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Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
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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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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 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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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 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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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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The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.
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The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
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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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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 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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A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
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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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There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
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Criticism is prejudice made plausible.