H. L. Mencken Quotes

When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever. I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.

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

The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, is one which lets the individual alone one which barely escapes being no government at all.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

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. 

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single

The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. [on Shakespeare]