H.L. Mencken

When women kiss, it always reminds one of prize-fighters shaking hands.

Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.

Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?

A: Why do men go to zoos?

Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

My guess is that well over eighty per cent of the human race goes through life without ever having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before, and by thousands.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. The normal human society is very little troubled by them. Whenever a new one appears the average man displays signs of dismay and resentment. The only way he can take in such a new idea is by translating it crudely into terms of more familiar ideas. That translation is one of the chief functions of politicians, not to mention journalists. They devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters. This debasement is intellectually reprehensible, but probably necessary to carry on the business of the world.

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.

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

Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.