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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.

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
Ever
Doubt
Skepticism
Something
Quite
Flavor
Feeling
Logical
Believe
Half
Believes
Scoundrel
Always
Idea
Absolutely
Sleeve
Men
Feelings
Confidence
Scoundrels
May
Highest
Instinctive
Ideas
Trust
Sleeves

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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
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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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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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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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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
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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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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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