Mencken's Quotes

#1. H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.

Ben Hecht

#2. In Mencken's view, "religion belongs to a very early stage of human development, and ... its rapid decay in the world since the Reformation is evidence of genuine progress" ("The Ascent of Man").

H.L. Mencken

#3. The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

H.L. Mencken

#4. 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

#5. Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

H.L. Mencken

#6. Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.

H.L. Mencken

#7. The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.

H.L. Mencken

#8. The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.

H.L. Mencken

#9. When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.

H.L. Mencken

#10. Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.

H.L. Mencken

#11. We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

H.L. Mencken

#12. The American moron's mind simply does not run in that direction; he wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights

H.L. Mencken

#13. There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties.

H.L. Mencken

#14. Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.

H.L. Mencken

#15. Wealth - any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

H.L. Mencken

#16. 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

#17. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken

#18. When somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money.

H.L. Mencken

#19. How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

H.L. Mencken

#20. No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket's confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.

H.L. Mencken

#21. No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

H.L. Mencken

#22. Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.

H.L. Mencken

#23. When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.

H.L. Mencken

#24. [Government's] great contribution to human wisdom ... is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.

H.L. Mencken

#25. The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.

H.L. Mencken

#26. The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.

H.L. Mencken

#27. 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

#28. It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.

H.L. Mencken

#29. In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.

H.L. Mencken

#30. There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

H.L. Mencken

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.

H.L. Mencken

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

R.K. Lilley

#35. An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's children devoured by wolves.

H.L. Mencken

#36. H. L. Mencken told me once that he answered all his mail, pleasant and unpleasant, with just one line, 'You may be right.' That's the way I feel now. It is in the realm of possibility, just barely, that I could be the one who's wrong.

Clare Boothe Luce

#37. A man's satisfaction with his salary depends on whether he makes more than his wife's sister's husband.

H.L. Mencken

#38. When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.

H.L. Mencken

#39. 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

#40. All of the American's foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings.

H.L. Mencken

#41. Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead.

H.L. Mencken

#42. Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans.

H.L. Mencken

#43. A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

H.L. Mencken

#44. Whenever a husband and a wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

H.L. Mencken

#45. The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.

H.L. Mencken

#46. The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He quite trusts himself thereafter.

H.L. Mencken

#47. 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

#48. There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.

H.L. Mencken

#49. The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

H.L. Mencken

#50. The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.

H.L. Mencken

#51. Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.

H.L. Mencken

#52. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#54. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#56. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#63. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#68. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#70. 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

#71. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#73. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#76. 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,

#77. Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

H.L. Mencken

#78. There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#80. Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

H.L. Mencken

#81. No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.

H.L. Mencken

#82. The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.

H.L. Mencken

#83. Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.

H.L. Mencken

#84. The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.

H.L. Mencken

#85. Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

H.L. Mencken

#86. The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.

H.L. Mencken

#87. Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

H.L. Mencken

#88. Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.

H.L. Mencken

#89. The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of.

H.L. Mencken

#90. The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

#92. Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

H.L. Mencken

#93. 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

#94. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

#96. 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

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken