Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H. L. Mencken

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken

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

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

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

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
H. L. Mencken

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.
H. L. Mencken

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
H. L. Mencken

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
H. L. Mencken

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
H. L. Mencken

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
H. L. Mencken

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. L. Mencken

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
H. L. Mencken

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
H. L. Mencken

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
H. L. Mencken

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H. L. Mencken

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken

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.
H. L. Mencken

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

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.
H. L. Mencken