Quotes by H. L. Mencken

“The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.”

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”

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

“A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.”

“The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.”

“Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.”

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of t...”

“Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.”

“Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn't they'd be married too.”

“The only really happy folk are married women and single men.”

“Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.”

“If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.”

“Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.”

“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.”

“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.”

“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

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

“It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.”