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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Fiction
Philosophy
Freedom
Truth
Used
Would
Cease
Stranger
Quickly

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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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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.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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