​ Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins.

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 urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule

People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men.

College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.

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

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

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

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

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

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

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

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

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone

Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of an advance auction of stolen goods

On children: Life is pleasant, but I have no yearning to clutter up the universe after it is over.

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

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

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

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.

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

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.

By sprowokować rebelię nie trzeba większości. Wystarczy kilku zdeterminowanych i zrozumiały cel.

Obecnie kobiecie katolickiej wolno unikać ciąży przy pomocy matematyki, ale surowo zabronione jest uciekanie się do chemii lub fizyki.

Kiedy dyplomata mówi "tak", oznacza to "może"; kiedy mówi "może", ma na myśli "nie"; kiedy mówi "nie", nie jest dyplomatą.

Altruizm, nawet ten absolutnie uczciwy, bierze się głównie stąd, że nieprzyjemnie jest mieć wokół siebie nieszczęśliwych ludzi.

Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.

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.

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.

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

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

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

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

Contemplating such a body as the House of Representatives one sees only a group of men who have compromised with honor. They have been broken to the goose-step. They have kept silent about good causes, and spoken in causes they know to be evil. The higher they rise, the further they fall. The occasional mavericks, thrown in by miracle, last a season and then disappear. The old Congressman, the veteran of genuine influence and power, is either one who is so stupid that the ideas of the mob are his own ideas, or one so far gone in charlatanry that he is unconscious of his shame. (Notes on Democracy, 1926)

The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret. (Chicago Sunday Tribune, April 26, 1925)

For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.

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. We know, or think we know, exactly what they will do in any given situation. They take the hazard out of life and put in security. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end. A normal man does not marry a woman thinking of her as a possible enemy; he marries her thinking of her as a perpetual friend. He is not only willing to give her his full confidence, he is eager to do it. His delight in her is his complete merging of their interests, and, in so far as it is humanly possible, of their personalities...The essence of their relation lies in its merging of interests, hopes, fears, sorrows, triumphs, glories.

For there is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or hanging. It is vulgar, it us ugly, it is stupid, it is useless. It is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming... Herein, indeed, lies the chief merit of democracy, when all is said and done... it may be swinish, it may be unutterably incompetent and dishonest but it is never dismal--its processes, when they irritate, never actually bore.(Baltimore Evening Sun, July 14, 1924)

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is.

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

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

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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

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

Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing they die earlier.

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

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.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.

The essence of a genuine professional man is that he cannot be bought.

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

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man, as of all the simpler mammals, is fear--fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is security.

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

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.

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

We must respect the other person'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.

What is done with joy is always better done.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even comprehending any save the most elemental--men whose chief thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is the dread of what they cannot understand.(Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920)

When women kiss, it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands.

Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

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

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.