HL Mencken

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

One of the laudable byproducts of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable.

The human race detests thrift as it detests intelligence. #truth

Progress, then, as I see it, is to be measured by the accuracy of man's knowledge of nature's forces.

I can't recall changing my mind about any capital matter. My body of fundamental ideas is the same today as when I first began to ponder.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. #truth

The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse

The man who accumulates more than he needs and saves the surplus is disliked by all who either can't or won't follow his example

A reporter can always spot another, just as a Freemason can spot a Freemason, or a detective a detective.

Life is a dead-end street

I never learned anything in school #acerb

Eastern philosophy bears no relation to known facts, and is full of assumptions and hypotheses that every intelligent man must laugh at.

4 book kinds which seldom lose money: murder stories, novels where hero forcibly overcomes the heroine, occult volumes, and Lincolniana

Every intelligent woman knows instinctively that the highest aspirations of her husband are fundamentally inimical to her.

Most men that escape college have a regret that pursues them, but I must confess I'm much too vain to have any such regret

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a moveable body

Journalists devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters.

Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

A man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end.

The effort to educate the uneducable is hopeless. #acerb