H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.

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
The common view of science is that it is a sort of machine for increasing the race's store of dependable facts. It is that only in part; in even larger part it is a machine for upsetting undependable facts.

H. L. Mencken
The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.

H. L. Mencken
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

H. L. Mencken
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

H. L. Mencken
Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.

H. L. Mencken
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency.

H. L. Mencken
The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.

H. L. Mencken
Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.

H. L. Mencken
It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

H. L. Mencken
I was wise to quit writing for the Sun back in January, 1941, for it was obvious by then that Roosevelt would horn into the war soon or late, and I knew by bitter experience in the last war that I'd be throttled at once. Since then I have thought out many likely articles, but not one of them has been printable. In these days, indeed, my very vocabulary is prohibited. I couldn't so much as mention Roosevelt or Churchill or any of the other frauds without having to face a savage official onslaught, with all blows directed below the belt. The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.

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
He [Calvin Coolidge] slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.

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

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
Judge — A law student who marks his own examination-papers.

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
Oregon is seldom heard of. Its people believe in the Bible, and hold that all radicals should be lynched. It has no poets and no statesmen.

H. L. Mencken
Man is one of the toughest of animated creatures. Only the anthrax bacillus can stand so unfavourable an environment for so long a time.

H. L. Mencken
A Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.

H. L. Mencken
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

H. L. Mencken
It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.

H. L. Mencken
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

H. L. Mencken