Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. — 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