Quotes from H. L. Mencken

Judge: a law student who marks his own papers.

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth — that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

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.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him. 

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse — as a man shoots himself.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.

Alimony — The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

Out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air—out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end.

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.

Time stays, we go.