H. L. Mencken Quotes
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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
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I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
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I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
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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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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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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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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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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
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Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
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Don't tell me what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or what he submits to from his wife. Simply tell me how he makes his living. It is the safest and surest of all known tests. A man who gets his board and lodging on this ball in an ignominious way is inevitably an ignominious man.
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
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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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We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.