H. L. Mencken Quotes
American - Writer September 12, 1880 - January 29, 1956


Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. Mencken

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 complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
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

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H. L. Mencken

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
H. L. Mencken

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
H. L. Mencken

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken

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

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
H. L. Mencken

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. Mencken

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
H. L. Mencken

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
H. L. Mencken

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

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
H. L. Mencken

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken

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

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
H. L. Mencken

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

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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

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

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

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

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
H. L. Mencken

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
H. L. Mencken

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
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

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 hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
H. L. Mencken

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
H. L. Mencken

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
H. L. Mencken

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
H. L. Mencken

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
H. L. Mencken

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

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
H. L. Mencken

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H. L. Mencken

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
H. L. Mencken

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
H. L. Mencken

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
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

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
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

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
H. L. Mencken

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
H. L. Mencken

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
H. L. Mencken

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

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. Mencken

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
H. L. Mencken

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

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
H. L. Mencken

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

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. Mencken

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records 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

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.
H. L. Mencken

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
H. L. Mencken

Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
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

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

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

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H. L. Mencken

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H. L. Mencken

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
H. L. Mencken

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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

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

Every man is his own hell.
H. L. Mencken
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Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H. L. Mencken

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
H. L. Mencken

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
H. L. Mencken

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

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. Mencken

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
H. L. Mencken

In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
H. L. Mencken

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
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

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

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

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
H. L. Mencken

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
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 or chemistry.
H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H. L. Mencken

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
H. L. Mencken

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
H. L. Mencken

Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
H. L. Mencken

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
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

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H. L. Mencken

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
H. L. Mencken

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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 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

Life is a dead-end street.
H. L. Mencken

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
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

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
H. L. Mencken

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
H. L. Mencken

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
H. L. Mencken

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
H. L. Mencken

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
H. L. Mencken

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
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

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 only really happy folk are married women and single men.
H. L. Mencken

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

Time stays, we go.
H. L. Mencken

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
H. L. Mencken

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
H. L. Mencken

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
H. L. Mencken

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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

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

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
H. L. Mencken

All government, of course, is against liberty.
H. L. Mencken

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

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

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
H. L. Mencken

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
H. L. Mencken

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.
H. L. Mencken

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken

Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.
H. L. Mencken

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. L. Mencken