… essayist and editor, was born on this date in 1880. Some Mencken quotes:
- The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
- Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
- A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
- It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
- The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
- The only really happy folk are married women and single 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 or chemistry.
- Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
- A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
- Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
- No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
- Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
- I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
- In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.