H. L. Mencken Quotes
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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 only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.
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It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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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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Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
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A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.
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Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
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Remorse - Regret that one waited so long to do it.
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Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
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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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Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
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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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It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so.
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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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Time stays, we go.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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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 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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[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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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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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 write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.