H. L. Mencken Quotes (241 Quotes)

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective it is also vastly more intelligent.

The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant . . . His culture is based on I am not too sure.

Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.

Verse libre a device for making poetry easier to read and harder to write.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

Never let inferiors do you a favor -- it will be extremely costly.

Time stays, we go.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism - in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can he really idle.

It is a sin to believe in the evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

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.

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.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

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.

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them.

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.

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.

The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell the truth.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle -- a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man -- that is, virtuous in the Y. M. C. A. sense -- has ever painted a picture worth looking at. . .

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.