H.L. Mencken > Quotes

“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: First Series

“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

“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

“A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
― H.L. Mencken

“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.”
― H.L. Mencken

“It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office.”
― H.L. Mencken

“On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.”
― H.L. Mencken

“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. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable...”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
― H.L. Mencken

“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

“For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense Of Women

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence”
― H.L. Mencken

“All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. 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. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
― H.L. Mencken

“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, American Scene V214

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
― H.L. Mencken

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.”
― H.L. Mencken

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
― H.L. Mencken, Gist of Mencken

“It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.”
― H.L. Mencken

“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. ”
― H.L. Mencken

“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
― H.L. Mencken

“You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.”
― H.L. Mencken

“I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
― H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.”
― H.L. Mencken

“You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.”
― H.L. Mencken

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense Of Women

“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. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”
― H.L. Mencken

“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