Best H. L. Mencken Quotes

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

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

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

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

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.

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

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.

Legend : a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

A judge is a law student who grades his own papers.

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

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

Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.

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

Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

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

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

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

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.

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

If I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.

To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

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

Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

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

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.