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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Baltimore
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Henry Louis Mencken
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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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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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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
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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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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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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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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken