Quotes by H. L. Mencken

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.

It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldnt care to drink with - even if he drank.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.

A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.

What men value in the world is not rights but privileges.

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesnt know.

God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and are right.

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.

Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

Tis more blessed to give than to receive for example wedding presents.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

No matter how happily a woman may be married it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.