H. L. Mencken

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

Nevertheless it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

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.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

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.

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

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.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.

Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism they are greatly magnified simply his own aims and aspirations.

Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead.

Life is a dead-end street.

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

The only cure for contempt is counter contempt.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.

Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism - in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can he really idle.

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

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff Say what you will against me when I am gone but dont forget to add in common justice that I was never converted to anything.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Every man is his own hell.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is opposed to every other form of rational thinking.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

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.

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.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is above all necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

There is always an easy solution to every problem neat plausible and wrong.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

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.

Conscience is a mother in law whose visit never ends.

Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Martinis are the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.