H. L. Mencken

Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.

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.

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

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.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

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.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

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.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.