H. L. Mencken

“Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.”

“All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.”

“The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.”

“I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.”

“There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.”

“The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.”

“The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!”

“The only time you have a free press is when you own one.”

“Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.”

“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”

“Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

“Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it; for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog”

“After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.”

“The great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts. Have they no means of resistance? Obviously they have. The worst tyrant, even under democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risks.”

“Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.”

“The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.”

“After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.”

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

“All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.”

“What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

“If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y”

“There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.”

“The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man”

“Criticism is prejudice made plausible.”

“A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.”

“The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.”

“I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.”

“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

“The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”

“I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.”

“Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop”

“Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”

“Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.”

“What reason is there for believing that a high death rate, in itself, is undesirable? To my knowledge none whatever. The plain fact is that, if it be suitably selective, it is extremely salubrious. Suppose it could be so arranged that it ran to 100% a year among politicians, executive secretaries, drive chairmen, and the homicidally insane? What rational man would object?”

“One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.”

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.”

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.”

“If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.”

“All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.”

“It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.”

“Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.”

“I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday... This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work.”

“The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.”

“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”

“Only to often on meeting scientific men, even those of genuine distiction, one finds that they are dull fellows and very stupid. They know one thing to excess; they know nothing else. Pursuing facts too doggedly and unimaginatively, they miss all the charming things that are not facts. ... Too much learning, like too little learning, is an unpleasant and dangerous thing.”

“To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason”

“The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.”

“The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.”

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