H. L. Mencken

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

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 turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

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.

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 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.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

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.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

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

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

Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn't they'd be married too.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

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.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.