1,045 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.

There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God.

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.