H. L. Mencken

A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.

Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.

If after I depart this vale you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

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

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

'Tis more blessed to give than to receive for example wedding presents.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.

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

Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them.