H.L. Mencken Quotes (74 Quotes)

You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing

The thing which sets off the American from all other men, and gives peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life but also adds to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration

What ass first let lose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege Looking back over my 19 years (of it) I can recall few times when I have voted with anything approaching exhilaration

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented

Imagine the Creator as a stand up comedian - and at once the world becomes explicable.

We are apt to forget that a great man is thus not only great, but also a man that a philosopher, in a life time, spends less hours pondering the destiny of the race than he gives over to wondering if it will rain tomorrow and to meditating upon the

After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits

It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child

God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat

Try to imagine a Shakespeare beset by fundamentalism, or a Goethe trying to work with the Ku Klux Klan roaring under his door

A professional politician is a professionally dishonourable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

The surest way to get on in politics in America is to play the leading part in a prosecution which attracts public notice

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think

Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.

The American people, taken one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the middle ages

In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is

The fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend dissent from its basic superstitions, or to grant any common honesty, or even any decency, to those who reject them

The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man

The American Republic, the envy and despair of all other nations

When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything

Has the great art and mystery of politics no apparent utility Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene and low down, and its salient virtuosi a gang of umitigated scoundrels Then let us not forget its high capacity to soo

Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it

The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing

I believe that any man or woman who, for a period of say five years, has earned his or her living in some lawful and useful occupation, without any recourse to public assistance, should be allowed to vote and that no one else should be allowed to vot

Man is a natural polygamist he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.

I am not only wrong, it appears, I am also immoral - the familiar step in Puritan logic

There is no record in history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious

That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of t

When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.

It is more blessed to give than receive for example, wedding presents

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.

Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world

The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one

The proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good.

A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation

Gynecologists perhaps the most ignorant class of men, when it comes to knowledge of women, in the country

For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt

Misogynist A man who hates women as much as women hate one another

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a