Quotes By H. L. Mencken

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

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

Life is a dead-end street.

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

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

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

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

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

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

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

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

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

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.

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

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 cynics are right nine times out of ten.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

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