Quotes from H. L. Mencken

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

What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.

The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.

No man ever quite believes in any other man.

If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

IDEALIST. One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

ADULTERY. Democracy applied to love.

WEALTH. Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

IMMORALITY. The morality of those who are having a better time.

CELEBRITY. One who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

VERS LIBRE. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to read.

DEMOCRACY. The theory that two thieves will steal less than one, and three less than two, and four less than three, and so on ad infinitum; the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

PLATITUDE. An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

HELL. A place where the Ten Commandments have a police force behind them.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, are right

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

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron

[On Warren G. Harding:] He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

The booboisie.

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.