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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.

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
Tells
Indignant
Pretends
Objection
Doings
Objections
Gossip

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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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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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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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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.
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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals
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The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
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Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
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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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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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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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