Quotes from H. L. Mencken

When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.

[Art is] an attempt to escape from life.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said is that its cosmetic effect is good.

Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.

It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.

A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.

The only time you have a free press is when you own one.

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.