Zitat des Tages von H. L. Mencken:
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
Life is a dead-end street.
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.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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.