H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H. L. Mencken
How does so much [false news] get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows — because nothing is easier than to fool them — because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands.

H. L. Mencken
A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

H. L. Mencken
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

H. L. Mencken
There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech.... A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.

H. L. Mencken
Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.

H. L. Mencken
The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth". It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

H. L. Mencken
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

H. L. Mencken
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

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
A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.

H. L. Mencken
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

H. L. Mencken
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

H. L. Mencken
I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

H. L. Mencken
Little Connecticut, with but 4,800 square miles of area, lies just outside New York City, and is made up, in almost equal parts, of golf links and squalid factory towns.

H. L. Mencken
There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]

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

H. L. Mencken
The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.

H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

H. L. Mencken
The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

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
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

H. L. Mencken