Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and… — 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
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
The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is,… — 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