Henry Louis Mencken

The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

They have a right to censure that have a heart to help: the rest is cruelty, not justice.