H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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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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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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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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Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
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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 plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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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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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
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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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A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
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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.