H. L. Mencken

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

“If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”

“Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.”

“Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”

“I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.”

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

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

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

“It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.”

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”