Quotes from H. L. Mencken

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

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.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.

The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.

Time is a great legalizer even in the fields of morals.

Time is a great legalizer even in the field of morals.

A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

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.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.