H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.

H. L. Mencken
Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths.

H. L. Mencken
The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.

H. L. Mencken
When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.

H. L. Mencken
The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.

H. L. Mencken
Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.

H. L. Mencken
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

H. L. Mencken
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

H. L. Mencken
The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man

H. L. Mencken
Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.

H. L. Mencken
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

H. L. Mencken
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

H. L. Mencken
In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnaught, and man from an open raft.

H. L. Mencken
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

H. L. Mencken
The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

H. L. Mencken
Theology — An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.

H. L. Mencken
Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

H. L. Mencken
Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.

H. L. Mencken
When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.

H. L. Mencken
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.

H. L. Mencken
If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.

H. L. Mencken
Perhaps the most valuable of all human possessions, next to an aloof and sniffish air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

H. L. Mencken
Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.

H. L. Mencken
Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief efforts to trying to prove that the other is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed and are right.

H. L. Mencken
The proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good.

H. L. Mencken