H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.

H. L. Mencken
The theory behind representative government is that superior men-or at least men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity-are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honest. There is little support for that theory in known facts...

H. L. Mencken
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

H. L. Mencken
Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.

H. L. Mencken
Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it has many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

H. L. Mencken
Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.

H. L. Mencken
It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.

H. L. Mencken
Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes.... They are the supreme realists of the race.

H. L. Mencken
Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations.

H. L. Mencken
Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.

H. L. Mencken
The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.

H. L. Mencken
The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.

H. L. Mencken
It takes a long while for a naturally trusting person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him.

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
Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

H. L. Mencken
Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.

H. L. Mencken
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

H. L. Mencken
It is the sex instinct that makes women seem beautiful, which they are only once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.

H. L. Mencken
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

H. L. Mencken
The notion that any respectable work of art can have a communal origin is whole nonsensical. The plain people, taking them together, are quite as incapable of a coherent esthetic impulse as the are of courage, honesty, or honor.

H. L. Mencken
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.

H. L. Mencken
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.

H. L. Mencken
The only really happy people are married women and single men.

H. L. Mencken
The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob

H. L. Mencken
At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.

H. L. Mencken