Quotes from H. L. Mencken

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.

It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent

Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah

The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Those who can't teach - administrate. Those who can't administrate - go into politics.

The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.

The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.