Mencken Quotes & Sayings

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

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. — H.L. Mencken

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

The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter. — H.L. Mencken

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. — H.L. Mencken

Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood. — 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

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

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. — H.L. Mencken

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. — H.L. Mencken

Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins. — John Scalzi

Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself. — H.L. Mencken

The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh. — H.L. Mencken

It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles. H.L. Mencken once said that the state doesn't just want to make you obey. It tries to make you want to obey. And that's one thing the government schools do very well. — Llewellyn Rockwell

America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously. — H.L. Mencken

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. — H.L. Mencken

If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. — H.L. Mencken

A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators. — H.L. Mencken

We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable. — H.L. Mencken

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. — 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

There is no record in the history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself. — H.L. Mencken

There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable. — H.L. Mencken

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. — H.L. Mencken

I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian... The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat - which wasn't there. 'That may be,' said the philosopher, 'but a theologian would have found it. — Julian Huxley

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her. — H.L. Mencken

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

The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure ... A Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretention, but there is no need to take it seriously. — H.L. Mencken

On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable. — H.L. Mencken

If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God ... — H.L. Mencken

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy. — H.L. Mencken

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music. — H.L. Mencken

The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. — H.L. Mencken

The number of men sitting at Atlanta and Leavenworth for revolting against the extortions of the government is always ten times as great as the number of government officials condemned for oppressing the taxpayers to their own gain. (Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, pp. — Murray N. Rothbard

Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity - he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit. — H.L. Mencken

Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis. — H.L. Mencken

Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. — H.L. Mencken

If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man. — H.L. Mencken

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them. — H.L. Mencken

At twenty-one, Richard Wright was not the world-famous author he would eventually be. But poor and black, he decided he would read and no one could stop him. Did he storm the library and make a scene? No, not in the Jim Crow South he didn't. Instead, he forged a note that said, "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by HL Mencken?" (because no one would write that about themselves, right?), and checked them out with a stolen library card, pretending they were for someone else. With the stakes this high, you better be willing to bend the rules or do something desperate or crazy. To thumb your nose at the authorities and say: What? This is not a bridge. I don't know what you're talking about. Or, in some cases, giving the middle finger to the people trying to hold you down and blowing right through their evil, disgusting rules. Pragmatism is not so much realism as flexibility. — Ryan Holiday

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

History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men. — H.L. Mencken

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. — H.L. Mencken

The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular. — H.L. Mencken

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. — H.L. Mencken

All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen. — H.L. Mencken

I roll out of my couch every morning with the more agreeable expectations. — H.L. Mencken

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her. — H.L. Mencken

He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite. — H.L. Mencken

Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment. — H.L. Mencken

[Art is] an attempt to escape from life. — H.L. Mencken

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops — H.L. Mencken

I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy. — 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

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas. — 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

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. — H.L. Mencken

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something. — 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

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. — H.L. Mencken

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything. — H.L. Mencken

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one. — H.L. Mencken

After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done. — H.L. Mencken

When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks. — H.L. Mencken

Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel. — H.L. Mencken

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man. — H.L. Mencken

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. — H.L. Mencken

Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public — H.L. Mencken

The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply. — H.L. Mencken

I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries. — H.L. Mencken

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

The best client is a scared millionaire. — H.L. Mencken

A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police. — 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

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

Most people want security in this world, not liberty. — H.L. Mencken

It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist. — H.L. Mencken

A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting. — 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

I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom ... the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men. — H.L. Mencken

The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots. — H.L. Mencken

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

War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use. — H.L. Mencken

So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is. — 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

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident. — H.L. Mencken

A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation. — H.L. Mencken

Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives. — H.L. Mencken

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

I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken. — Ernest Hemingway,

Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands. — H.L. Mencken

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men. — H.L. Mencken

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him — H.L. Mencken

It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. — H.L. Mencken

College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity. — H.L. Mencken

In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will there be another super-superman to follow and another super-super-superman after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline come after, with return down the long line, through the superman down to man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether, and empty space? — H.L. Mencken

Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on ... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric. — H.L. Mencken

For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith. — H.L. Mencken

Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people. — H.L. Mencken

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill. — H.L. Mencken