Quotes by H. L. Mencken

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of Gods children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didnt theyd be married too.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

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.