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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

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
Feels
Face
Efforts
Think
Whatever
Reasonable
Thinking
Faces
Racism
People
Free
Secure
Political
Terror
Unalterably
Without
Excuse
Negro
Enough
Speech
Ridicule
Feel
Effort
Opposed

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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.
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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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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 smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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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 most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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