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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.

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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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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It is only doubt that creates.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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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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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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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.
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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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[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
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