H. L. Mencken

A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

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.

Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. .... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Wherever I sit is the head of the table.

No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.

To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

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

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.

As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes care of those who have been so fortunate as to come into the world foolish. Expressing skepticism that adventure does not necessarily contribute to scientific knowledge.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket.

Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.

All of the American's foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings.

They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.