H. L. Mencken Quotes
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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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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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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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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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors.
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Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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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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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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One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.
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The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.
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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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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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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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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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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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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.