H. L. Mencken

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

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

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

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

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

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

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

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

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 or chemistry.

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

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

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

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

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

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

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

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

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

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

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

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

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

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.

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

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 is a dead-end street.

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

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