H. L. Mencken Quotes

Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.

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

Under democracy one party always devotes it's chief energies to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right. the United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent.It's history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.

I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor — Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!

What lay at the bottom of their savagery, of course, was their idiotic belief in Calvinism — beyond question the most brutal and barbaric theology ever subscribed to by mortal man, whether in or out of the African bush.

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

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

Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it.

Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.

Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

The opera…is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

The American moron’s mind simply does not run in that direction; he wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.