H. L. Mencken

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

“Adultery is the application of democracy to love.”

“Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Honor is simply the morality of superior men.”

“The only really happy folk are married women and single 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.”

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

“What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”

“To die for an idea it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!”

“The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

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

“Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.”

“Time stays, we go.”

“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”

“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.”