H. L. Mencken Quotes

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

“A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.”

“War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.”

“The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.”

“Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.”

“[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.”

“Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.”

“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.”

“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.”

“Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.”

“Honor is simply the morality of superior men.”

“Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn”

“No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts.”

“When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.”

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

“The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.”

“Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.”

“The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.”

“Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.”

“In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.”

“Morality is nothing but a struggle for safety”

“Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.”

“Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals”

“We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.”

“the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.”