The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I… — 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
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking… — 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… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many… — 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
This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Here the only genuine conflict is between true believers. Of a given text in Holy Writ one faction may say this thing… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips… — 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
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each… — 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
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails. — 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
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool. — 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… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation. — 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