The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
H. L. Mencken

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
H. L. Mencken

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H. L. Mencken

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.
H. L. Mencken

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.
H. L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
H. L. Mencken

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
H. L. Mencken

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
H. L. Mencken

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken

Time stays, we go.
H. L. Mencken

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
H. L. Mencken

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
H. L. Mencken

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

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
H. L. Mencken

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
H. L. Mencken

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.
H. L. Mencken