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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.

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
Eye
Lack
May
Intelligence
Certainly
Youth
Terrible
Shams
Eyes
Devoid
Though
Sharp
Knowledge
Sees

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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
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Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
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Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
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One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
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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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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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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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