H. L. Mencken Quotes - 9quotes.com

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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
Written by H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
Written by H. L. Mencken
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.
Written by H. L. Mencken
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
Written by H. L. Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
Written by H. L. Mencken
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.
Written by H. L. Mencken
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.
Written by H. L. Mencken
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
Written by H. L. Mencken
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Written by H. L. Mencken
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Written by H. L. Mencken
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.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
Written by H. L. Mencken
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
Written by H. L. Mencken
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.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
Written by H. L. Mencken
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.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
Written by H. L. Mencken
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
Written by H. L. Mencken
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
Written by H. L. Mencken
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
Written by H. L. Mencken
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Written by H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Written by H. L. Mencken
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
Written by H. L. Mencken
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
Written by H. L. Mencken

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