Famous Quotes

Quotes by H L Mencken

• Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
• Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
• Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
• Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
• Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
• Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
• Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
• No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
• Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
• On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
• Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
• Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
• Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
• Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
• The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
• The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
• The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
• The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
• The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
• The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
• The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
• The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
• The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
• The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
• There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
• There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
• Time stays, we go.
• To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
• To die for an idea it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
• War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
• We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
• We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.