H. L. Mencken quotes - page 5

Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian. (H. L. Mencken)
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. View quote
H. L. Mencken
I've made it a rule never to drink by daylight and never to refuse a drink after dark. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel. View quote
H. L. Mencken
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Criticism is prejudice made plausible. View quote
H. L. Mencken
What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace. View quote
H. L. Mencken
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end. View quote
H. L. Mencken
No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs. View quote
H. L. Mencken
There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. (H. L. Mencken)
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him. View quote
H. L. Mencken
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. (H. L. Mencken)
Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world. View quote
H. L. Mencken
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. View quote
H. L. Mencken
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident. View quote
H. L. Mencken
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom ... the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men. View quote
H. L. Mencken