H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
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The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
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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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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
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All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
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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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Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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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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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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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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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 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 is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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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.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.