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H. L. Mencken Quotes

Type: Writer Quotes Category: American Writer Quotes Date of Birth: September 12, 1880 Date of Death: January 29, 1956 Nationality: American Find on Amazon: H. L. Mencken Related Authors: Mason Cooley Eric Hoffer Elbert Hubbard Oliver Wendell Holmes Marilyn vos Savant Bill James Jeff Long

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman. 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 cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. H. L. Mencken A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. H. L. Mencken A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers. 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 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 All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. 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 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 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 Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies. H. L. Mencken Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. H. L. Mencken Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking. H. L. Mencken Criticism is prejudice made plausible. 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 Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. 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 decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. H. L. Mencken Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. H. L. Mencken Every man is his own hell. H. L. Mencken Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself. 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 Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. H. L. Mencken For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing. H. L. Mencken For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, 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 Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good. 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 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 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 all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. 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 confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. 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 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 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 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 the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft. 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 even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. H. L. Mencken It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man. 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 It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. 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 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 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 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 Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers. 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 Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. 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 Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. 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 Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. 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 Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true. H. L. Mencken Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. H. L. Mencken Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. 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 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 Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body. 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 capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. H. L. Mencken The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore. 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 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 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 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 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 older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. 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 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 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 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 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 Theology is the effort to explain 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 There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good. H. L. Mencken There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. H. L. Mencken Time stays, we go. 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 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 Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. 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 We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. H. L. Mencken We must be willing to pay a price for freedom. 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 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 What men value in this world is not rights but privileges. 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 When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands. 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 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 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 Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. H. L. Mencken

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