H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

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

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

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

All government, of course, is against liberty.

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.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

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.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

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.

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.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

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