Quotes from H. L. Mencken

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket.

My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

There are two impossibilities in life: "just one drink" and "an honest politician."

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

Whenever "A" attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon "B," "A" is most likely a scoundrel.

Life is a dead-end street.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

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

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.

The more a man dreams, the less he believes.

The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob