Famous Quotes

Quotes by H L Mencken

• A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
• A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
• A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
• A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
• A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
• Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
• All government, of course, is against liberty.
• All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
• Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn't they'd be married too.
• Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
• Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
• Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
• Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
• Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
• Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
• Husbands never become good they merely become proficient.
• I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
• I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
• I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
• If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
• Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
• In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
• In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
• It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
• It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
• It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
• Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
• Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.