The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonde… - H. L. Mencken

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

In matters of personality, he had more in common with Hemingway than either man acknowledged—not only a combative spirit and a devotion to the cult of masculinity but also an abhorrence of romanticism and a nearly compulsive desire for order. Mencken’s creed, stated later in his memoirs, is a close cousin of Hemingway’s own. “Competence, indeed,” Mencken was to write, “is my chief admiration…And next to competence I put what is called being a good soldier—that is, not whining.”