H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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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.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.
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What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
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Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
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The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech - alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.
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Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.
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No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.
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All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.