“We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.” — H.L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“Suffice it to say that the vile arts of the hussy prevailed over that noble and upright man—that she enticed him, by adroit appeals… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“I can't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.” — H.L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he [Harry Truman] would have promised to provide them with free missionaries,… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“I have seen something of the horrors of war, and much too much of the worse horrors of peace.” — H.L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“Don’t tell me. I have been there. No longer ago than last Tuesday—or was it last Monday?—I went into one of those big restaurants on the Unter den Linden and ordered a small steak, French fried potatoes, a piece of pie and a cup of coffee—and what do you think those thieves charged me for it? Three marks fifty. That’s… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share
“ONE OF the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. It is largely to blame, I suspect, for the slowness with which sound ideas are disseminated in the world. The minute a new one bobs up some faction or other of theologians falls upon it furiously,… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share
“But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share
“If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share
“The American moron’s mind simply does not run in that direction; he wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But that was probably a shaky theory, for some men who work the hardest have nothing to express. A hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share
“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share
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