H. L. Mencken Simple Quotations

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong...

Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Two simple principles lie at the bottom of the whole matter, and they may be precipitated into two rules. The first is that, when there is a choice, the milder drink is always the better-not merely the safer but the better. The second is that no really enlightened drinker ever takes a drink at a time when he has any work to do. There is, of course, more to it than this; but these are sufficient for the beginner, and even the virtuoso never outgrows them.

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth