No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage?… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the… — 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
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it… — 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… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead — 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