H. L. Mencken Quotes

“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

“The only really happy folk are married women and single men.”

“A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.”

“Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.”

“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.”

“Wealth: any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.”

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

“In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.”

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

“The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.”

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”

“Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.”

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.”

“The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.”

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

“The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.”

“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

“A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of.”

“A historian is an unsuccessful novelist.”

“Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.”

“It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”

“There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.”

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”