H. L. Mencken Quotes
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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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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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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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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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor - Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!
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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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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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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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Life is a dead-end street.
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It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
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It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
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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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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
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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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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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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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I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
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I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
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Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.