H R Mencken Quotes

#1. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

H.L. Mencken

#2. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

H.L. Mencken

#3. America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.

H.L. Mencken

#4. The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.

H.L. Mencken

#5. The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

H.L. Mencken

#6. A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

H.L. Mencken

#7. The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

H.L. Mencken

#8. After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

H.L. Mencken

#9. Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

H.L. Mencken

#10. Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place

H.L. Mencken

#11. When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#13. The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

H.L. Mencken

#14. The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls.

H.L. Mencken

#15. Love is like war. Easy to begin, but very hard to stop." ~H.L. MENCKEN

R.K. Lilley

#16. If H. P. Lovecraft and H. L. Mencken had ever collaborated, they might have come up with something like The Edge of Reason. This one will delight thinkers-and outrage true believers-of all stripes.

George R R Martin

#17. Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
H. L. Mencken

R.K. Lilley

#18. 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.

H.L. Mencken

#19. No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.

H.L. Mencken

#20. Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#22. Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.

H.L. Mencken

#23. Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

H.L. Mencken

#24. The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.

H.L. Mencken

#25. The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.

H.L. Mencken

#26. Love is the mistaken belief that one woman differs from another.

H.L. Mencken

#27. The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.

H.L. Mencken

#28. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.

Ernest Hemingway,

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

H.L. Mencken

#30. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

H.L. Mencken

#32. A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

H.L. Mencken

#33. Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.

H.L. Mencken

#34. Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

H.L. Mencken

#35. On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable.

H.L. Mencken

#36. If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.

H.L. Mencken