Jury: a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
H. L. Mencken Quotations
We found 84 matching quotations.
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
There comes a time when a man must spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
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.
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
Judge: a law student who marks his own papers.
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The worshiper is the father of the gods.
He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
Alimony: the ransom the happy pay to the devil.
Creator: a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
College football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students - there would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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.
Congress consists of one third, more or less, scoundrels; two thirds, more or less, idiots; and three thirds, more or less, poltroons.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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.
Love: The delusion that one woman differs from another.
No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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.
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing they were dead and in heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in hell.
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
When women kiss, it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands.
Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
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.
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
Wife: a former sweetheart.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing they die earlier.
Democracy: The worship of jackals by jackasses.
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebums and smaller adrenal glands.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, thehelpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
Lawer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
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.
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.