Famous Quotes

Quotes by H L Mencken

• 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!