1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them.

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.