Quotes from H. L. Mencken

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.

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

It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.

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

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.

What men value in the world is not rights, but privileges.

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.

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

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.

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

Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

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.

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.