Quotes from H.L. Mencken

They are brothers to the fox who boasted that he had made the hounds run....

His condition had plainly improved. Once a slave , he was now only a serf. Once condemned to silence, he was now free to criticize his masters, and even to flout them, and the ordinances of God with them..

For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.

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 that 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 to be malicious.

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

Suffice it to say that the vile arts of the hussy prevailed over that noble and upright man—that she enticed him, by adroit appeals to his sympathy, into taking her upon automobile rides, into dining with her clandestinely in the private rooms of dubious hotels

No writer, in truth, is ever really a free agent. What he does in his trade is determined not only by his immediate environment and the ideational currents of his time, but also and more especially by the play of inherited forces and predispositions within him.

In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

It is a tragic but inescapable fact that most of the finest fruits of human progress, like all of the nobler virtues of man, are the exclusive possession of small minorities, chiefly unpopular and disreputable.

Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show,democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is,by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel.In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.

You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist. [In an open letter to Upton Sinclair, printed in The American Mercury, June 1936]

One man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists.

I believe that it is something quite different, and that that something may be described briefly as a desire to shine in the world without too much effort. The young theologue, in brief, is commonly an ambitious but somewhat lazy and incompetent fellow, and he studies theology instead of medicine or law because it offers a quicker and easier route to an assured job and public respect.

For humility and poverty, in themselves, the world has little liking and less respect. In the folk-lore of all races, despite the sentimentalization of abasement for dramatic effect, it is always power and grandeur that count in the end.

What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic?

In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates.

Looking back over a life of hard work… my only regret is that I didn't work even harder.

Um metafísico é alguém que, quando você lhe diz que dois vezes dois são quatro, ele quer saber o que você entende por vezes, o que significa dois, e o que quer dizer são e por que isto dá quatro. Por fazerem tais perguntas, os metafísicos desfrutam um luxo oriental nas universidades e são respeitados como homens educados e inteligentes.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. - H.L. Mencken

Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.

It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto, In God we trust, were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, Verboten, substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet.

Todo homem prudente, ao lembrar-se de que a vida é curta, deveria dispensar uma hora ou duas, de vez em quando, para um exame crítico de suas amizades. Deve pesá-las, repensá-las, testar se ainda contêm algum metal. Algumas poderão sobreviver, talvez com mudanças radicais em seus termos. Mas a maioria será varrida de seus minutos e ele tentará esquecê-las, assim como tenta esquecer seus frios e pegajosos amores do ano retrasado.

A diferença entre o sexo pago e o sexo grátis é que o sexo pago costuma sair mais barato.