H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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.
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The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.
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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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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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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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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.
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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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As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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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.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
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The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.
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To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
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One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.