H. L. Mencken Quotes

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One of the crying needs of the time is for a suitable burial service for the admittedly damned.

H. L. Mencken
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

H. L. Mencken
The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

H. L. Mencken
It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

H. L. Mencken
Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness.

H. L. Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we accept his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

H. L. Mencken
Perhaps the most valuable of all human possessions, next to an aloof and sniffish air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

H. L. Mencken
The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.

H. L. Mencken
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

H. L. Mencken
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

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

H. L. Mencken
My old suggestion that public offices be filled by drawing lots, as a jury box is filled, was probably more intelligent than I suspected. It has been criticized on the ground that selecting a man at random would probably produce some extremely bad State governors. [...] But I incline to believe that it would be best to choose members of the Legislature quite at random. No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they'd be measurably more honest, taking one with another. Finally, there would be the great advantage that all of them had got their jobs unwillingly, and were eager, not to spin out their sessions endlessly, but to get home as soon as possible.

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 bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.

H. L. Mencken
The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is.... In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.

H. L. Mencken
The worst government is 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
War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary it tends to exalt him.

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

H. L. Mencken
No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way.

H. L. Mencken
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

H. L. Mencken
What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.

H. L. Mencken
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

H. L. Mencken
Philadelphia has always been one of the most Pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

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

H. L. Mencken
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 United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.

H. L. Mencken
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

H. L. Mencken
Whenever a husband and a wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

H. L. Mencken
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

H. L. Mencken
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

H. L. Mencken
[Paul Patterson and I] soon got on the subject of the war, and I said flatly that I thought the Sun's course was not only ignorant and absurd, but also not a little disingenuous. It had gone over to the English in an abject and ignominious fashion, against all reason and all the obvious facts. Worse, it had yielded supinely to the most outrageous fiats of the Roosevelt censorship, and had even exceeded them. This shook Patterson somewhat, for he likes to think of himself as a news editor, and he insisted that in handling the war news the Sun had done good work.

H. L. Mencken