The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
H. L. MenckenIn human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
H. L. MenckenThe most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
H. L. MenckenCivilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.
H. L. Mencken