Quotes from H. L. Mencken

He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.

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 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.

Haste is of the devil. Slowness is of God.

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

God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him

The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.

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.

The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.

Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

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

[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.

Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.

The worst government is the most moral.

I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.

Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and are right.

A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.