H. L. Mencken Quotes (241 Quotes)

A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

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

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

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.

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

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

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.

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

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense amd common decency.

Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

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

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

No normal man ever fell in love after 30 when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.

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

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

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

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

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

If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he so sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary on the White House backyard come Wednesday.

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

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

If Los Angeles is not the one authentic rectum of civilization, then I am no anatomist. Any time you want to go out again and burn it down, count me in.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

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

Every man is his own hell.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Anyone can be accurate and even profound, but it is damned hard work to make criticism charming.

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

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.

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities...

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them. . .

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.

If I had my way, no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust under the United States.

Most philosophical treatises show the human cerebrum loaded far beyond its Plimsoll mark.

An idealist is a man who looks at a rose, and thinks, because it smells sweet, it will make better soup than cabbage.

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

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

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.

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