H. L. Mencken

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

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

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

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

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

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

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

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

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

Time stays, we go.