H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken

… essayist and editor, was born on September 12th in 1880. I’ve posted many of these before, but Mencken has some great lines that I never tire of reading:

• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with…
• It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
• Courtroom—A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds in favor of Judas.
• 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.
• 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.