H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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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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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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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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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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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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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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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.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.
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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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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.
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A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.