1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

Morality is nothing but a struggle for safety.

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.

Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done – a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.

An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor’s children devoured by wolves.

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob.

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.