Every election is a sort of advance auction sale
of stolen goods.
- H. L. Mencken
Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my
agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a
manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.
- H. L. Mencken
For every complex problem, there is a solution
that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken
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, are
right
- H. L. Mencken
I believe that all government is evil, and that
trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
- H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar
doctrine that age brings wisdom.
- H. L. Mencken
The men American people admire most extravagantly
are the most daring liars; the men they detest
most violently are those who try and tell them the
truth
- H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers,
looks around for a coffin.
- H. L. Mencken
No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would
still give her a glow to see him commit suicide
for her.
- H. L. Mencken
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone,
somewhere, may be happy.
- H. L. Mencken
A man loses his sense of direction after four
drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses
- H. L. Mencken
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.
- H. L. Mencken
Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of
one's wife's relatives
- H. L. Mencken
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad
speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of
people who go to lectures and don't want to meet
them.
- H. L. Mencken
(1880 - 1956)
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit
upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin
slitting throats
- Henry Louis Mencken
"Should the day ever dawn, when Jefferson's warnings are heeded at last,
and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that
Calvin's bones now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite will come
to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service."
-Henry Louis Mencken, on Coolidge's death in 1933
After all, all he did was string together a lot of
old, well-known quotations.
- Henry Louis Mencken, on Shakespeare
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from
another.
- H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over
intelligence
- Henry Louis Mencken
