Quotes from H. L. Mencken

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

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

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God....

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.

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

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss of humanity.