H. L. Mencken quotes:

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

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.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

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.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

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.

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.

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.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

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.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

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 hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

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.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

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

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

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

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

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

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

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

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

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.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

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

Life is a dead-end street.

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

Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

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

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

All government, of course, is against liberty.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

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

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

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

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

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

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 flavored and colored, and put into cans."

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic."

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year."

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.

All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.

All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.

Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.

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.

On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.

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

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.

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.

It seems to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in a small town than you'd be in New York. I thoroughly detest New York, though I have to go there very often.... Have you ever noticed that no American writer of any consequence lives in Manhattan? Dreiser tried it (after many years in the Bronx), but finally moved to California.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

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

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

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

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

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

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

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.

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

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.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

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

The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

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.

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.

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

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.

The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.

The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular.

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

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.

No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.

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

[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.