Quotes By H. L. Mencken

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

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

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.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

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

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

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.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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

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.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

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

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

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.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

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

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.

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.

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