A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful.… — 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
If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All of the American's foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash… — 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
