H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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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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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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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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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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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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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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[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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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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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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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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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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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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A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
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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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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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Life is a dead-end street.
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I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
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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.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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Time stays, we go.
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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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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.