The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
- H. L. Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
- H. L. Mencken

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
- H. L. Mencken

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
-- H. L. Mencken

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
- H. L. Mencken

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H. L. Mencken

A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses
- H. L. Mencken

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
- H. L. Mencken

Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives
- H. L. Mencken

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
- H. L. Mencken

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
- H. L. Mencken

We are a nation of communities 'a brillant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad peaceful sky.
- H. L. Mencken

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
- H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence
- H. L. Mencken

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
- H. L. Mencken

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
- H. L. Mencken

Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.
- H. L. Mencken

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken

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, are right
- H. L. Mencken

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
- H. L. Mencken

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
- H. L. Mencken

The men American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try and tell them the truth
- H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
- H. L. Mencken