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Quotes by H. L. Mencken

A bore is simply a nonentity who resents his humble lot in life, and seeks satisfaction for his wounded ego by forcing himself on his betters.
– H. L. Mencken
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
– H. L. Mencken
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
– H. L. Mencken
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
– H. L. Mencken
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
– H. L. Mencken
A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.
– H. L. Mencken
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
– H. L. Mencken
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
– H. L. Mencken
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
– H. L. Mencken
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
– H. L. Mencken
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
– H. L. Mencken
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
– H. L. Mencken
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
– H. L. Mencken
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
– H. L. Mencken
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
– H. L. Mencken
All government, of course, is against liberty.
– H. L. Mencken
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
– H. L. Mencken
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
– H. L. Mencken
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
– H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
– H. L. Mencken
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
– H. L. Mencken
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
– H. L. Mencken
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
– H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
– H. L. Mencken
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
– H. L. Mencken
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
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
– H. L. Mencken
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
– H. L. Mencken
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
– H. L. Mencken
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
– H. L. Mencken
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
He slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
– H. L. Mencken
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
– H. L. Mencken
Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
– H. L. Mencken
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
– H. L. Mencken
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.
– H. L. Mencken
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
– H. L. Mencken
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
– H. L. Mencken
I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
– H. L. Mencken
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
– H. L. Mencken
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
– H. L. Mencken
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
– H. L. Mencken
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
– H. L. Mencken
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
– H. L. Mencken
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
– H. L. Mencken
If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.
– H. L. Mencken
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
– H. L. Mencken
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
– H. L. Mencken
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
– H. L. Mencken
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
– H. L. Mencken
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
– H. L. Mencken
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.
– H. L. Mencken
It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
– H. L. Mencken
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
– H. L. Mencken
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
– H. L. Mencken
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
– H. L. Mencken
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
– H. L. Mencken
Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
– H. L. Mencken
Life is a dead-end street.
– H. L. Mencken
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
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
– H. L. Mencken
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
– H. L. Mencken
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
– H. L. Mencken
Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
– H. L. Mencken
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.
– H. L. Mencken
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
– H. L. Mencken
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
– H. L. Mencken
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
– H. L. Mencken
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
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
– H. L. Mencken
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
– H. L. Mencken
No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.
– H. L. Mencken
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
– H. L. Mencken
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
– H. L. Mencken
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
– H. L. Mencken
No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
– H. L. Mencken
Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent-slimy, sneaking and abominable.
– H. L. Mencken
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
– H. L. Mencken
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
– H. L. Mencken
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
– H. L. Mencken
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
– H. L. Mencken
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
– H. L. Mencken
Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
– H. L. Mencken
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
– H. L. Mencken
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
– H. L. Mencken
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
– H. L. Mencken
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist, Jack.
– H. L. Mencken
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
– H. L. Mencken
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
The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
– H. L. Mencken
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
– H. L. Mencken
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
– H. L. Mencken
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
– H. L. Mencken
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
– H. L. Mencken
The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.
– H. L. Mencken
The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combatted at the public expense, and not fostered.
– H. L. Mencken
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
The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.
– H. L. Mencken
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
– H. L. Mencken
The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
– H. L. Mencken