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H. L. Mencken Quotes


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.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

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.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

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 man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

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.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.