H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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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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If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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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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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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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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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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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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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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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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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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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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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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A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
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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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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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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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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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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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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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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.