H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956

"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."

"The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."

"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."

"For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end."

"A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it."

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

"Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them."

"The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught."

"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

"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."

"Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."

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

"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

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

-H.L. Mencken
U.S. editor, 1880-1956