H. L. Mencken Quotes

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.

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.

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

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

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

the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.