Quotes By H. L. Mencken

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.