Continued Insights from H. L. Mencken

"I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk"

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable"

"A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable"

"A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank"

"A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas"

"A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground"

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier"

"A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in"

"A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married"

"A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them"

"A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers"

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar"

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin"

"A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there"

"A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman"

"Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love"

"Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience"

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods"

"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"

"We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine"

"Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed"

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry"

"I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine"

"There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor"

"Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself"

"Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest"

"When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands"

"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before"

"What men value in this world is not rights but privileges"

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary"

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule"

"The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil"

"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"

"The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral"

"Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon"

"Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong"

"Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier"

"The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line"

"Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body"

"Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse"

"Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him"