H. L. Mencken

It is only doubt that creates.

I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.