J L Mencken Quotes

#1. A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

H.L. Mencken

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

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

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#10. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#12. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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,

#17. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#19. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#21. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#24. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#26. 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

#27. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#29. 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

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

H.L. Mencken