1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.

The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all other men are just as easy to fool.

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...

The more a man dreams, the less he believes.

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.