1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.

All successful newpapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

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

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

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.

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.

The truth is . . . that the great artists of the world are never puritans, and seldom ever ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.

No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts.