1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.

Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.

Fame: an embalmer trembling with stage fright.

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.