Quotes By H. L. Mencken

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

Time stays, we go.

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

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

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.

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

In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

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

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

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

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

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

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

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

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

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

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

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.

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.