Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect. — 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
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs. — 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
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
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
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 difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the… — 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
It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent… — 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
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
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a… — 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
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin or when he sees silver he looks… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it-… — 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
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 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