Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
~ H. L. Mencken
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with - even if he drank.
Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
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.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
'Tis more blessed to give than to receive for example wedding presents.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
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 only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself.
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched 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.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn't they'd be married too.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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.
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
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.
