H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.

Accept the past for what it was. Acknowledge the present for what it is. Anticipate the future for what it can become.

It isn’t true that you live only once. You only die once. You live lots of times if you know how.

Stars are good too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed last night I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn’t reach, which astonished me. Then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into thee midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could’ve held out a little longer, maybe I could’ve got one.

Feelings are often born from the matrix of conditions beyond your control. Let them just pass through, like a cloud in the sky.

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

Life’s three best teachers: heartbreak, empty pocket, failures.

Mistrust the man who finds everything good, the man who finds everything evil and still more the man who is indifferent to everything.

I’ve sworn never to read any reviews ever again except those that are pointed out to me as nice ones. I would say that most of us who are considered in the artist realm just take it so terribly, and, you know, it can kill ya!

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.

You’ve got to teach youngsters the difference between right and wrong, but you shouldn’t try to poke it down their throats. Let them ask the questions and then give them the answers.

We’re cool for the summer.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

The less you know, the more you believe.

If I may venture to be frank I would say about myself that I was every inch a gentleman …