Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
- H. L. Mencken - In Government
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Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
- H. L. Mencken - In History
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
- H. L. Mencken - In History
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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.
- H. L. Mencken - In Life
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Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
- H. L. Mencken - In Love
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Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- H. L. Mencken - In Love
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
- H. L. Mencken - In Love
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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.
- H. L. Mencken - In Marriage
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Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
- H. L. Mencken - In Marriage
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
- H. L. Mencken - In Marriage
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If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.
- H. L. Mencken - In Marriage
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
- H. L. Mencken - In Marriage
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
- H. L. Mencken - In Marriage
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
- H. L. Mencken - In Peace
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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 - In Politics
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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.
- H. L. Mencken - In Politics
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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.
- H. L. Mencken - In Politics
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We must respect the other fellow's religion,but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- H. L. Mencken - In Religion
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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.
- H. L. Mencken - In Religion
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
- H. L. Mencken - In Words to the Wise
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