We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
Author
H. L. Mencken
113 quotations
About H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also earned him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose styles.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by H. L. MenckenPuritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
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 …
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.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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.
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.