H. L. Mencken Quotes

To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

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

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

At the bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world, and hence hatred of him. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans.

Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn't got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.

Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

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

The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.

Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

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

If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth ... it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.