223 quotes
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.
A Little Book in C Major (1916)
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
A Book of Prefaces (1917)
Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
A Book of Burlesques (1916)
The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth -- broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic.
I do not object to being denounced, but I can't abide being schoolmastered, especially by men I regard as imbeciles.
Prejudices, Third Series (1922)
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers.
A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
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 coloured and put into cans.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate.
A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians—and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.
A Little Book in C Major (1916)
Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent--slimy, sneaking and abominable.
The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.
A Book of Prefaces (1917)
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
Prejudices, Third Series (1922)
Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastness and grab it by the tail.
Prejudices, Third Series (1922)
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
Minority Report (1956)