H. L. Mencken Quotes
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It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.
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The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
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It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
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The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
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The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.
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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular.
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Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.
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The university president who cashiered every professor unwilling to support Woodrow Wilson for the first vacancy in the