1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. ... The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard them from the consequences of their vices.

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted

A poet over 30 is pathetic

School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake