Quote: A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: The cynics are right nine times out of ten. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year? [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: We must be willing to pay a price for freedom. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: Archbishop -- A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: Criticism is prejudice made plausible. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: The lunatic fringe wags the underdog. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: A judge is a law student who grades his own papers. [H. L. Mencken]
Quote: 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. [H. L. Mencken]