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Quotes by H. L. Mencken

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
– H. L. Mencken
There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
– H. L. Mencken
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
– 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 sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
– 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
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
– H. L. Mencken
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
– 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 have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
– H. L. Mencken
JUDGE, n: A law student who marks his own papers.
– H. L. Mencken
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
– H. L. Mencken
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
– H. L. Mencken
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
– H. L. Mencken
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
– H. L. Mencken
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
– H. L. Mencken
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
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
– 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
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
– H. L. Mencken
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
– H. L. Mencken
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
– H. L. Mencken
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
– H. L. Mencken
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
– H. L. Mencken
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
– H. L. Mencken
Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.
– H. L. Mencken
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
– 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
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
– H. L. Mencken
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
– H. L. Mencken
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
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
– H. L. Mencken
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
– 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
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
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
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 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
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 older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
– 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 chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
– H. L. Mencken
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
– H. L. Mencken
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
– 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
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
– H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
– H. L. Mencken
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
– 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 even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
– 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
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
– H. L. Mencken
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
– 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 decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
– H. L. Mencken
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
– H. L. Mencken
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
– H. L. Mencken
A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
– H. L. Mencken