1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

I can’t imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

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.

Puccini – silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.

Genius: the ability to prolong one’s childhood.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.

No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket’s confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.

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.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.

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.