H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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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 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 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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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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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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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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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 never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
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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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Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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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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Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.
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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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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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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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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.