Quotes from H. L. Mencken

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

The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.

God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.

Man's objection to love is that it dies hard: women's, that when it is dead it stays dead.

In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.

Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.

A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.

The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.

It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.

The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.