Google
|
The quotations are arranged by author name.
Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
Select the first character of the author's last name that you want to look at:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
|
| H. L. Mencken
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it. A judge is a law student who grades his own papers. A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank. Adultery is the application of democracy to love. Alimony – the ransom that the happy pay to the devil. An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing. Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. Archbishop – a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ. Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives. Bachelors know more about women than married men do. If they didn't, they'd be married too. Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. after he speaks it is seldom necessary to assume. Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking. Criticism is prejudice made plausible. Demagogue: One who preaches a doctrine he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses. Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. Don't overestimate the decency of the human race. Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters. Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods. Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Historian – an unsuccessful novelist. I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone. 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. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner. If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl. In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one. Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake. 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. It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men. 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 and chemistry. It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent american law ... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts. Legend : a lie that has attained the dignity of age. Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas. Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Love: The delusion that one woman differs from another. Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne. Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong. Most people want security in this world, not liberty. 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. No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the american public. No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer. Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse. On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent. One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring. Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian. Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself. Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Remorse is regret that one waited so long to do it. Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious. Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse. The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it. The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading. The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. The cynics are right nine times out of ten. 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. The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake. The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. The lunatic fringe wags the underdog. The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do. The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year? The New Deal began, like the Salvation army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace. The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them. The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights. The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties. The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake. The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe. The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it. 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. The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression. Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing. There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read. There is no record in history of a happy philosopher. There's always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule– and both commonly succeed, and are right. Unquestionably, there is progress. The average american now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. We must be willing to pay a price for freedom. What men value in this world is not rights but privileges. Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it. |
|
Sports Quotations.
Show Business Quotations.
|