H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

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

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

H. L. Mencken
Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?

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

H. L. Mencken
Explanations exist, they have existed for all times, for there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken
The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.

H. L. Mencken
Let it appear in a criminal trial that the accused is a Sunday-school superintendent, and the jury says guilty almost automatically.

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
All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.

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
On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.

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

H. L. Mencken
Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.

H. L. Mencken
As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

H. L. Mencken
Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.

H. L. Mencken
That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.

H. L. Mencken
Liberty... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority.

H. L. Mencken
The fact that I have no remedy for the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

H. L. Mencken
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

H. L. Mencken
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?

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 worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all other men are just as easy to fool.

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 know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist.... He plans to be both an artist and a moralist — a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community — that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.

H. L. Mencken