Quotes from Henry Louis Mencken

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

Every man is his own hell.

For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.

For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

Legend a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Life is a dead-end street.

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosiac, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.

Love is the triump of imagination over intelligence.

No man ever quite believes in any other man.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

School days are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, with brutal violations of common sense and common decency.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.

The fact that I have no remedy for the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong possibility that yours is a fake.

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who Is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.

The only cure for contempt is countercontempt.

The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia--to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.