H.L. Mencken Quotes

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

One man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

"Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right."

Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, and its salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.

There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

The theory behind representative government is that superior men—or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity—are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts...