Quotes from H. L. Mencken

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

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.

In the United States the apostrophe seems to be doomed.... In other respects American and English punctuation show few differences. The English are rather more careful than we are, and commonly put a comma after the next-to-last member of a series, but otherwise are not too precise to offend a red-blooded American.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Alimony: the ransom the happy pay to the devil.

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

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

College football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students - there would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks.

Democracy is a form of religion, it is the worship of jackals by jack asses.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, thehelpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

Jury: a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

Lawer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another