Quotes By H. L. Mencken

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

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.

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

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

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

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

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

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

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.