1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus.

This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high attainments in their specialties-for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and Osler-men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard them stated.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.