H.L. Mencken Quotes

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

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.

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.

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

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

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

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

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.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.