Top 150 Quotes by H. L. Mencken

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

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.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

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