Quotes By H. L. Mencken

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.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

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

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.

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.

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

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

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.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

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.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

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.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

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.

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.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?