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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for 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
Shows
Atheist
Believe
Content
Good
However
Shall
Forever
Conceivably
Dies
Vanish
Show
Nothingness
Desire
Immortality

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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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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.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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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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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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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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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
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