H. L. Mencken quotes
"Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them."
Take this quote mobile"War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebums and smaller adrenal glands."
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
"All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling."
"Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."
"Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own."
"...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night."
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps."
"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."