Henry Louis Mencken Quotes (44 Quotes)

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it The first one at least is disposed of.

Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.

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

If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.

Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.

No form of liberty is worth a darn sic which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

After all, why be good How many will actually believe it of us.

A home is not a mere transient shelter its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

The Christian always mixes prudence with his devotion. He is willing to serve three gods, but draws the line at one wife.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.

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

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

There are some people who read too much The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

It is a sin to believe evil of others, But it is seldom a mistake.

It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous.... The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk About abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of the decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.

There is always an easy solution to every human problemneat, plausible and wrong.

The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.

There are two times in every man's life when he is thoroughly happy just after he has met his first love and just after he has parted from his last one.

The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.

Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.

The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without ... the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.

The real man lies in the depths of the subconscious.

To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first.

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.

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.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

How little it takes to make life unbearable a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

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

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

All of the great patriots now engaged in edging and squirming their way toward the Presidency of the Republic run true to form. That is to say, they are all extremely wary, and all more or less palpable frauds. What they want, primarily, is the job the necessary equipment of unescapable issues, immutable principles and soaring ideals can wait until it becomes more certain which way the mob will be whooping.

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.

The essence of a self-reliant and autonomous culture is an unshakable egoism.