H. L. Mencken

“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”

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

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

“You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”

“There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

“The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.”

“One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they procee...”

“Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.”

“The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high...”

“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to disc...”

“When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they ha...”

“I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.”

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

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

“Adultery is the application of democracy to love.”

“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

“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.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great mass...”

“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.”

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