H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
-
Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.
-
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.
-
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.
-
Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.
-
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.
-
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
-
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
-
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.
-
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 national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
-
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
-
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.
-
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
-
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 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.
-
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
-
If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
-
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.
-
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
-
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.
-
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
-
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.