H. L. Mencken Quotes (241 Quotes)


    I've made it a rule never to drink by daylight and never to refuse a drink after dark.

    I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

    Theology --An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.

    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.

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



    A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

    Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

    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.

    Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.


    It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

    In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.


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

    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.

    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.

    Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

    Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

    The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

    Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

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

    Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.

    Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life just after he met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.

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

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

    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.

    The first kiss is stolen by the man the last is begged by the woman.

    The theater. . . is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

    A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.

    It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

    Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

    I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.

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

    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.

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

    Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

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

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

    All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man.

    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.

    Thousands of American women know far more about the subconscious than they do about sewing.

    The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. . . . The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.

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

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

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


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