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What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.

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
Uncomfortable
Often
Truth
Ails
Human
Caressing
Humans
Amusing
Mind
Mainly
Something
Seeks
Dull

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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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Why do men go to zoos?
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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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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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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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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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