After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
