Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. MENCKENThe best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
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Always remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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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.
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Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
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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.
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The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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