H. L. Mencken
Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.Collection: Life
[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.Collection: Reading
Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of moralsCollection: Time
After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.Collection: Responsibility
I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.Collection: Editors
The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.Collection: Believe
At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.Collection: Christian
The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.Collection: Men
He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.Collection: Political
The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.Collection: Men
A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.Collection: Men
There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.Collection: Fashion
The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.Collection: Yesterday
The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers.Collection: Competition
He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.Collection: Night
War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.Collection: Sports
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.Collection: Running
What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.Collection: San Francisco
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.Collection: Horse
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.Collection: Cities
At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.Collection: Education
No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.Collection: Walking Sticks
The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.Collection: Political
The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.Collection: Art
All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.Collection: Order
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.Collection: Evil
Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.Collection: Believe
Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.Collection: Freedom
It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicalitysentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all--stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding.Collection: Believe
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.Collection: Country
When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.Collection: Death
If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.Collection: Literature
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.Collection: Writing
No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.Collection: Might
All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.Collection: Equality
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.Collection: Trust
No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me--has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has any one ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable.Collection: Education
The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.Collection: Philosopher
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.Collection: Cynical
It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.Collection: Dog
What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.Collection: Art
[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks inevitably of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man.Collection: Honesty
Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.Collection: Book
I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides. On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five.Collection: Men
To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse, 10 times as ignorant, 10 times as unfair and tyrannical, 10 times as complaisant and pusillanimous, and 10 times as devious, hypocritical, disingenuous, deceitful, pharisaical, Pecksniffian, fraudulent, slippery, unscrupulous, perfidious, lewd and dishonest.Collection: Average
If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.Collection: Men
All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Women