Quotes by H. L. Mencken

If after I depart this vale you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.

Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.

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

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.

A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.

The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself.

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

We are here and it is now. Further than that all knowledge is moonshine.

Time is a great legalizer even in the fields of morals.

Time is a great legalizer even in the field of morals.

Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.