Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
— H. L. Mencken
Life is a dead-end street.
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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.
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
