Quotes from H.L. Mencken

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops

Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian Businessman.

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.

Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.

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

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.