H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all the damage they do might be worse.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

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.

No matter how happily a woman may be married it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear, what sting is justice.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Most people want security in this world not liberty.

Poetry has done enough when it charms but prose must also convince.

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.

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness but after that he begins to bunch them.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

I believe in only one thing: liberty, but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion, it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

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

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.