Quotable Quotes--H.L. Mencken Edition

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

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

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

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

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Democracy is also a form of worship. 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.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

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

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

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.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

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

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

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

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

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

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

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.

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

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 common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

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 worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

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

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

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

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

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.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

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