H.L. Mencken Quotes & Sayings

No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation. — H.L. Mencken

Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities. — H.L. Mencken

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. — H.L. Mencken

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone. — H.L. Mencken

The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be. — H.L. Mencken

Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours. — H.L. Mencken

The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment. — H.L. Mencken

The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman. — H.L. Mencken

I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men. — H.L. Mencken

Two simple principles lie at the bottom of the whole matter, and they may be precipitated into two rules. The first is that, when there is a choice, the milder drink is always the better-not merely the safer but the better. The second is that no really enlightened drinker ever takes a drink at a time when he has any work to do. There is, of course, more to it than this; but these are sufficient for the beginner, and even the virtuoso never outgrows them. — H.L. Mencken

I am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and agree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew what was true, I'd probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so far I have not found it. — H.L. Mencken

There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions. — H.L. Mencken

Frankness and courage are luxuries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up at national conventions. Thus it is pleasant to remember Cleveland, and to speak of him from time to time. He was the last of the Romans. If pedagogy were anything save the puerile racket that it is he would loom large in the schoolbooks. As it is, he is subordinated to Lincoln, Roosevelt I and Wilson. This is one of the things that are the matter with the United States. — H.L. Mencken

Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. — H.L. Mencken

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. — H.L. Mencken

Wealth - any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband. — H.L. Mencken

I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled ... They contained precisely the same rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispiness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact. — H.L. Mencken

The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him. — H.L. Mencken

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

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. — H.L. Mencken

Elections are futures markets in stolen property. — H.L. Mencken

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable ... — H.L. Mencken

What Mencken most strongly objected to in religion was not the expression of nonsensical views - these could easily be combated by rebuttal from the other side - but the inveterate tendency of religion to seek the enforcement of its views by the power of the government. — H.L. Mencken

The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very
friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious. — H.L. Mencken

The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud. — H.L. Mencken

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack. — H.L. Mencken

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves. — H.L. Mencken

The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — H.L. Mencken

Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another "Rosenkavailer." — H.L. Mencken

Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell. — H.L. Mencken

Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work. — H.L. Mencken

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

Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness — H.L. Mencken

God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them. — H.L. Mencken

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man. — H.L. Mencken

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. — H.L. Mencken

This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world. — H.L. Mencken

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. — H.L. Mencken

Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual. — H.L. Mencken

The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation. — H.L. Mencken

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought. — H.L. Mencken

All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers. — H.L. Mencken

Citizenship in New York is now worth no more than citizenship in Arkansas, for it is open to any applicant from the marshes of Bessarabia, and, still worse, to any applicant from Arkansas. — H.L. Mencken

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. — H.L. Mencken

[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century - perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks inevitably of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man. — H.L. Mencken

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell. — H.L. Mencken

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor. — H.L. Mencken

The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum - the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth. — H.L. Mencken

We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it. — H.L. Mencken

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

Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. — H.L. Mencken

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil. — H.L. Mencken

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. — H.L. Mencken

The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel. — H.L. Mencken

I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes. — H.L. Mencken

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

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them. — H.L. Mencken

The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts
not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man. — H.L. Mencken

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads — H.L. Mencken

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist. — H.L. Mencken

I am never much interested in the effects of what I write ... I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my ... books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, leaves me unmoved. I can't recall any review that has even influenced me in the slightest. I live in sort of a vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion. — H.L. Mencken

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

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist ... He plans to be both an artist and a moralist
a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community
that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success. — H.L. Mencken

Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals. — H.L. Mencken

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

When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife. — H.L. Mencken

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

The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. — H.L. Mencken

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down. — H.L. Mencken

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt. — H.L. Mencken

Morality and honor are not to be confused. The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught. — H.L. Mencken

One cannot enter a State legislature or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a dubious character. — H.L. Mencken

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps. — H.L. Mencken

The more a man dreams, the less he believes. — H.L. Mencken

Here is tragedy and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum. — H.L. Mencken

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools ... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife. — H.L. Mencken

No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. — H.L. Mencken

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

Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority. — H.L. Mencken

The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man. — H.L. Mencken

Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus. — H.L. Mencken

Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or at a man. — H.L. Mencken

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites? — H.L. Mencken

If Franklin Delano Roosevelt became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday. — H.L. Mencken

No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs. — H.L. Mencken

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe. — H.L. Mencken

What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells. — H.L. Mencken

Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay. — H.L. Mencken

As long as the Southern colleges have revivals on their campuses and students get converted to Methodism and join the YMCA and are accepted as gentlemen, it will be impossible to think of the South as civilized ... The educated folk of the Old South took theology lightly, and religion to them was hardly more than a charming ritual, useful on solemn occassions. — H.L. Mencken

It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism. — H.L. Mencken

Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one. — H.L. Mencken

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself
by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true. — H.L. Mencken

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

I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday ... This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work. — H.L. Mencken

How to Drink Like a Gentleman: The Things to Do and the Things Not To, as Learned in 30 Years' Extensive Research. — H.L. Mencken

Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent. — H.L. Mencken

To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong ... — H.L. Mencken

Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence. — H.L. Mencken

Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum. — H.L. Mencken

The only obligation I recognize in this world is my duty to my immediate family — H.L. Mencken