Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had… — 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