Quotes from H. L. Mencken

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.

Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.

Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place

When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.

The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

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

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.

As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far - much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet.

How do they taste? They taste like more.

In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it.