Author: H.L. Mencken Page 2

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Communication Intelligence Reading/Writing

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

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Baseball Language Music

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Characteristics

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Marriage Wives

For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution and it is always wrong.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Murphy’s Laws Problems

Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Emotions Happiness Love

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
People Success

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Beliefs Places

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, and are right.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Democracy Government Politics Success

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Beliefs People Religion Sex Women

The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Government Money Taxes

His writing is rumble and bumble, flap and doodle, balder and dash.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Communication Insults Reading/Writing

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

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Marriage Men Women

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Characteristics Husbands Marriage

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Insults Reviews/Criticism

Injustice is relatively easy to bear, what stings is justice.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Government Law

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Emotions Intelligence Love Memory

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
People

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

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Beliefs Religion Science/Weather

Dachshund: An animal half a dog high by a dog and a half long.

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Animals Definitions Dogs

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

(1880 – 1956) journalist, essayist, editor & satirist
Art Democracy Government Science/Weather