1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

Puccini - silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.

Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.

So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us...

Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.