H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

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
The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.

H. L. Mencken
Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

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
Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

H. L. Mencken
If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth... it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.

H. L. Mencken
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

H. L. Mencken
A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

H. L. Mencken
The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell.

H. L. Mencken
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

H. L. Mencken
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

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
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

H. L. Mencken
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.

H. L. Mencken
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

H. L. Mencken
Philadelphia has always been one of the most Pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

H. L. Mencken
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

H. L. Mencken
What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.

H. L. Mencken
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

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 common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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
The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top, there is no limit to oppression.

H. L. Mencken
The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is.... In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.

H. L. Mencken
The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.

H. L. Mencken
One of the crying needs of the time is for a suitable burial service for the admittedly damned.

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

H. L. Mencken
The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

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

H. L. Mencken
To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler would it be if men died for ideas that were true.

H. L. Mencken