Quotes by H. L. Mencken
(1880 - 1956)

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Action	Every normal man must be tempted at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Age	The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties hi is at the maximum of his villainy.
Alimony	The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
Altruism	Men are the only animals that devore themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It as an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
America	The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob.
America	Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian business man.
America	The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth . . . we have clowns among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as Jack Dempsey is above the paralytic -- and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds.
Americans	Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Archbishop	Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
Belief	The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief accupation of mankind.
California	In Southern California the vegetables have no flavor and the flowers have no smell.
California	The California climate make the sick well and the well sick, the old young and the young old.
Celebrity	A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
Children	At eight or nine, I suppose, intelligence is no more that a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
Christians	What I got in Sunday School . . . was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous.
Clergy	Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themeselves as theological quacks.
Communism	Communisim like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophesies.
Conscience	Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Conscience	Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
Contraception	It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.
Courts	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.
Criticism	Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Cynics	A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
Democracy	The worship of jackals by jackasses
Democracy	Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy	Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
Democracy	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.
Doubt	Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.
Dullness	It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
Evolution	It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
Faith	Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Football	College football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students -- there would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks.
Friends	Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
God	Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
God	Creator: a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
God	It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him.
God	God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the misrable. They find not oly sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated ego's; He will set them above their betters.
Golf	If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
Government	I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
Government	Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Happiness	The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Happiness	Every man is thouroughly happy twice in his life; just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.
Historians	Historian; an unsuccessful novelist.
Humanity	The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
Humanity	Don't over estimate the decency of the human race.
Husbands	Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
Husbands	A women usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.
Idealists	An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Ideas	To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
Immorality	Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
Immortality	Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead.
Insults	It is his life work to announce the obvious in terms of the scandalous.
Judges	A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
Juries	Jury: a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
Knowledge	We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
Lawyers	Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.
Lectures	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.
Life	Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of a dilemma.
Life	For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Los Angeles	Nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis. - (on L.A.)
Love	Love is the illusion that one women differs from another.
Love	To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia.
Main	Maine is as dead, intellectually, as Abyssinia, Nothing is ever heard from it.
Man	It is hard to elieve that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
Marriage	He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
Money	The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
Morality	Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong.
New England	The New England shopkeepers and theologians never really developed a civilization; all they ever developed was a government. They were, at their best, tawdry and tacky fellows, oafish in manner and devoid of imagination.
New York	The trouble with New York is that it has no nationality at all. It is simply a sort of free port -- a place, where the raw materials of civilization are received, sorted out , and sent further on.
New York	New York: A third-rate Babylon.
Opera	The opera . . . is to music what a bowdy house is to a cathedral.
Patriotism	When you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
Philosophy	Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Poets	A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
Politicians	A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
Politics	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
Politics	It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
Problems	For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong
Progress	Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
Puritanism	Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Sports	It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
Truth	It is a fine thing to face machine guns for immortality and a medal, but isn't it a fine thing too, to face calumny, injustice and loneliness for the truth which makes men free?
Wisdom	The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

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