H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
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.
-
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
-
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
-
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
-
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
-
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
-
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
-
The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
-
All government, of course, is against liberty.
-
Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself--by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.
-
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
-
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
-
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
-
What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.
-
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
-
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
-
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
-
Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.
-
A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.