1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre....

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

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

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

The university president who cashiered every professor unwilling to support Woodrow Wilson for the first vacancy in the Trinity. . . .

Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect.

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.

Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.