H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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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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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
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Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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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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Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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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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The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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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 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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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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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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Life is a dead-end street.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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Time stays, we go.
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When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
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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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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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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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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.