Continued Insights from H. L. Mencken

"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"

"Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband"

"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"

"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing"

"The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt"

"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"

"Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious"

"Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them"

"Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy"

"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince"

"Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true"

"Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian"

"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"

"Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"

"Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago"

"Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on"

"Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly"

"Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another"

"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"

"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"

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods"

"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"

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart"

"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office"

"We must be willing to pay a price for freedom"

"Time stays, we go"

"There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good"

"One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring"

"Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time"

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time"

"Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ"

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup"

"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it"

"All government, of course, is against liberty"

"Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil"

"Adultery is the application of democracy to love"

"A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents"

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Inspiring Quotes by H. L. Mencken - Page 2