H. L. Mencken Quotes

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.

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

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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

The State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

Alimony – the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.