If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
— H. L. Mencken
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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 the plain people.
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
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.
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
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.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
