H. L. Mencken

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

The best client is a scared millionaire.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.

Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.

Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.

Two simple principles lie at the bottom of the whole matter, and they may be precipitated into two rules. The first is that, when there is a choice, the milder drink is always the better-not merely the safer but the better. The second is that no really enlightened drinker ever takes a drink at a time when he has any work to do. There is, of course, more to it than this; but these are sufficient for the beginner, and even the virtuoso never outgrows them.

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.

What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.

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.

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.