Quotes from H. L. Mencken

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.

Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.

War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.

Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.

Man makes love by braggadocio, and woman makes love by listening.

Time stays, we go.

BALLOT BOX. The altar of democracy.

HYGIENE. Bacteriology made moral...

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. The theory that, since the sky rockets following a wallop in the eye are optical delusions, the wallop itself is a delusion and the eye another.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.