H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.

H. L. Mencken
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

H. L. Mencken
If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.

H. L. Mencken
The extortions and oppressions of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims; so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the archbishop's secretary's nephew's mistress' illegitimate son is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

H. L. Mencken
There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn't. If he did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if He did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientists to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system.

H. L. Mencken
It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicalitysentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all--stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

H. L. Mencken
Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

H. L. Mencken
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories

H. L. Mencken
I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

H. L. Mencken
By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally
and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists?

H. L. Mencken
Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

H. L. Mencken
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

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
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.

H. L. Mencken
It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.

H. L. Mencken
A sound American is simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts and questionings, and who accepts instantly, and as incontrovertible gospel, the whole body of official doctrine of his day, whatever it may be and no matter how often it may change. The instant he challenges it, no matter how timorously and academically, he ceases by that much to be a loyal and creditable citizen of the republic.

H. L. Mencken
No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket's confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.

H. L. Mencken
What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

H. L. Mencken
A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

H. L. Mencken
The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers.

H. L. Mencken
The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.

H. L. Mencken
No politician is ever benefited by saving money; it is spending it that makes him.

H. L. Mencken
Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

H. L. Mencken
The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.

H. L. Mencken
Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

H. L. Mencken
No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

H. L. Mencken
Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.

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

H. L. Mencken
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

H. L. Mencken
In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.

H. L. Mencken