H. L. Mencken Quotes (241 Quotes)


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

    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.

    The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

    When one hears of a poet past thirty-five he seems somehow unnatural and obscene.

    Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.



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

    Progress is the process whereby the human race is getting rid of whiskers, the veriform appendix and God.

    Most people want security in this world, not liberty.


    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.

    The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

    There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.

    For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

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

    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.

    The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.

    The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

    One of the crying needs of the time is for a suitable burial service for the admittedly damned.

    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.

    To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

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

    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.

    Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

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

    Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

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

    As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

    All successful newpapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

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

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

    There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher.


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

    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.

    Remorse is regret that one waited so long to do it.

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

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

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

    Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

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

    It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

    It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.


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

    Man's objection to love is that it dies hard woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead.

    God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos He will set them above their betters.

    Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

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

    A politician is an animal that can sit on the fence and keep both ears to the ground.


    Related Authors


    Niccolo Machiavelli - William Arthur Ward - Rudyard Kipling - Paul Davies - Margaret J. Wheatley - Joseph Addison - John Grisham - Ivo Andric - Catherine Crowe - Anthony Hope


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