H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H. L. Mencken
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

H. L. Mencken
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

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

H. L. Mencken
Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.

H. L. Mencken
Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.

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

H. L. Mencken
The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.

H. L. Mencken
A tin-horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham doctor.

H. L. Mencken
One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.

H. L. Mencken
I have lived in one house in Baltimore for nearly forty-five years. It has changed in that time, as I have - but somehow it still remains the same. No conceivable decorator's masterpiece could give me the same ease. It is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it I'd be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg.

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 intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.

H. L. Mencken
The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretences, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

H. L. Mencken
The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

H. L. Mencken
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.

H. L. Mencken
It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.

H. L. Mencken
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

H. L. Mencken
The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

H. L. Mencken
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

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

H. L. Mencken
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

H. L. Mencken
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

H. L. Mencken