H.L. Mencken Quotes

#1. The university president who cashiered every professor unwilling to support Woodrow Wilson for the first vacancy in the
Trinity ...

H.L. Mencken

#2. A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

H.L. Mencken

#3. A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

H.L. Mencken

#4. A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

H.L. Mencken

#5. Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

H.L. Mencken

#6. It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

H.L. Mencken

#7. No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.

H.L. Mencken

#8. After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.

H.L. Mencken

#9. For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the whole world has very little liking. He is always unpopular.

H.L. Mencken

#10. Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.

H.L. Mencken

#11. New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.

H.L. Mencken

#12. The opera ... is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

H.L. Mencken

#13. Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

H.L. Mencken

#14. We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

H.L. Mencken

#15. The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

H.L. Mencken

#16. Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

H.L. Mencken

#17. A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.

H.L. Mencken

#18. All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

H.L. Mencken

#19. Debussy
A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#21. Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian Businessman.

H.L. Mencken

#22. Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

H.L. Mencken

#23. The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.

H.L. Mencken

#24. Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

H.L. Mencken

#25. The only practical effect of having a soul is that it fills man with anthropomorphic and anthropocentric vanities - in brief, with the cocky superstitions that make him disgusting.

H.L. Mencken

#26. Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

H.L. Mencken

#27. If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.

H.L. Mencken

#28. Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

H.L. Mencken

#29. War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

H.L. Mencken

#30. Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

H.L. Mencken

#31. Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.

H.L. Mencken

#32. Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

H.L. Mencken

#33. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

H.L. Mencken

#34. As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

H.L. Mencken

#35. He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.

H.L. Mencken

#36. Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn

H.L. Mencken

#37. To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

H.L. Mencken

#38. No politician is ever benefited by saving money; it is spending it that makes him.

H.L. Mencken

#39. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.

H.L. Mencken

#40. Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

H.L. Mencken

#41. There are two kinds of music; German music and bad music.

H.L. Mencken

#42. Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

H.L. Mencken

#43. The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

H.L. Mencken

#44. Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.

H.L. Mencken

#45. Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

H.L. Mencken

#46. Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.

H.L. Mencken

#47. All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.

H.L. Mencken

#48. In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.

H.L. Mencken

#49. The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.

H.L. Mencken

#50. The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.

H.L. Mencken

#51. The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians
and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

H.L. Mencken

#52. Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

H.L. Mencken

#53. A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

H.L. Mencken

#54. Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

H.L. Mencken

#55. One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

H.L. Mencken

#56. The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

H.L. Mencken

#57. There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.

H.L. Mencken

#58. What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor

H.L. Mencken

#59. I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.

H.L. Mencken

#60. All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.

H.L. Mencken

#61. Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

H.L. Mencken

#62. The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob

H.L. Mencken

#63. 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.

H.L. Mencken

#64. We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.

H.L. Mencken

#65. If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.

H.L. Mencken

#66. Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

H.L. Mencken

#67. Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.

H.L. Mencken

#68. To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

H.L. Mencken

#69. The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy; he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.

H.L. Mencken

#70. Life is a dead-end street.

H.L. Mencken

#71. The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world.

H.L. Mencken

#72. The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.

H.L. Mencken

#73. One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.

H.L. Mencken

#74. Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

H.L. Mencken

#75. The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.

H.L. Mencken

#76. When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.

H.L. Mencken

#77. You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing.

H.L. Mencken

#78. The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.

H.L. Mencken

#79. A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.

H.L. Mencken

#80. Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop

H.L. Mencken

#81. Justice is what you get when you run out of money.

H.L. Mencken

#82. Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

H.L. Mencken

#83. It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

H.L. Mencken

#84. A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.

H.L. Mencken

#85. It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.

H.L. Mencken

#86. A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators.

H.L. Mencken

#87. The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

H.L. Mencken

#88. Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

H.L. Mencken

#89. The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

H.L. Mencken

#90. The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.

H.L. Mencken

#91. The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.

H.L. Mencken

#92. A Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.

H.L. Mencken

#93. Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives.

H.L. Mencken

#94. If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God ...

H.L. Mencken

#95. Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.

H.L. Mencken

#96. To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

H.L. Mencken

#97. All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.

H.L. Mencken

#98. Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus.

H.L. Mencken

#99. If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.

H.L. Mencken

#100. 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.

H.L. Mencken