H. L. Mencken

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and are right.

God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

What men value in the world is not rights but privileges.

A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.

Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with - even if he drank.

It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.