The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies. When they fail to come off its clergy simply say… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I have lived in one house in Baltimore for nearly forty-five years. It has changed in that time, as I have -… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes - that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and… — 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
Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours. — 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
Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What reason is there for believing that a high death rate, in itself, is undesirable? To my knowledge none whatever. The plain… — 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