When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled...They contained precisely the same rubber,… — 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 government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws… There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share