The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard: women's, that when it is dead it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence, it is almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once. — 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
No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech - alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country… — 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
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
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All the great enterprises of the world are run by a few smart men: their aides and associates run down by rapid… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. — 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
Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change… — 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