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The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.

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
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Precisely
Every
Deal
Criminals
Believe
Deals
Professional

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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
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Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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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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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
H. L. Mencken