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H. L. Mencken Quotes


Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

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 a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

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 capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

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 common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

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.