A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's children devoured by wolves. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image