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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
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Henry Louis Mencken
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
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What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
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There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
H. L. Mencken
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
H. L. Mencken