H. L. Mencken
69 quotations
A judge is a law student who grades his own papers.
Legend : a lie that has attained the dignity of age.
The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
Life is a dead-end street.
Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia.
If I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.
Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.
Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
Remorse is regret that one waited so long to do it.
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.