Quotes By H. L. Mencken

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

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.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

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.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

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.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

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

Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Life is a dead-end street.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

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.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.