Quotes from H. L. Mencken

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

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

Anyhow, the hole in the doughnut is at least digestible.

No one in this world, so far as I know… has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts.

I drink exactly as much as I want, and one drink more.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

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

We are here and now. Further than that, all knowledge is moonshine.

Wealth — any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking.

The public… demands certainties…. But there are no certainties.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

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

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

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.