H. L. Mencken

A journalist, essayist, and magazine editor.

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35 quotations — 28 Funny, 7 Serious.

  1. A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
    1.
  2. A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
    2.
  3. A legend is a lie that has attained the dignity of age.
    3.
  4. A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness.
    But after that, he begins to bunch them.
    4.
  5. A man may be a fool and not know it.
    But not if he is married.
    5.
  6. A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
    6.
  7. Alimony: The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
    7.
  8. An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
    8.
  9. Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool.
    After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
    9.
  10. Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be wathching.
    10.
  11. Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue, to men he knows to be idiots.
    11.
  12. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
    12.
  13. For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
    13.
  14. Historian: An unsuccessful novelist.
    14.
  15. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency.
    This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
    15.
  16. I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
    16.
  17. It is hard to believe a man is telling the truth, when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
    17.
  18. It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
    18.
  19. 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.
    19.
  20. Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
    20.
  21. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
    21.
  22. Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
    22.
  23. Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
    23.
  24. The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
    24.
  25. The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
    25.
  26. 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.
    26.
  27. We are here, and it is now.
    Further than that, all human knowledge is nonsense.
    27.
  28. Wealth: Any income that is at least one hundred dollars more, a year, than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
    28.
  30. Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
    29.
  31. Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
    30.
  32. Explanations exist; they have existed for all time.
    There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
    31.
  33. Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
    32.
  34. Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
    33.
  35. We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense, and to the extent, that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
    34.
  36. What men value, in this world, is not rights, but privileges.
    35.