H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Osteopath — One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone on soft tissue. The proof of his theory is to be found in the heads of those who believe it.

H. L. Mencken
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads

H. L. Mencken
The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.

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
What reason is there for believing that a high death rate, in itself, is undesirable? To my knowledge none whatever. The plain fact is that, if it be suitably selective, it is extremely salubrious. Suppose it could be so arranged that it ran to 100% a year among politicians, executive secretaries, drive chairmen, and the homicidally insane? What rational man would object?

H. L. Mencken
The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

H. L. Mencken
A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.

H. L. Mencken
The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.

H. L. Mencken
At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.

H. L. Mencken
Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

H. L. Mencken
The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.

H. L. Mencken
One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.

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
Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

H. L. Mencken
For a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas.

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
It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.

H. L. Mencken
No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.

H. L. Mencken
There has [never] lived a poet... ancient or modern, near or far, who ever managed to write good poetry... at a time when he was suffering from stenosis at any point along the thirty-foot via dolorosa running from the pylorus to the sigmoid flexure... The more he tries, the more vividly he will be conscious of his impotence.

H. L. Mencken
It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.

H. L. Mencken
No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.

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

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

H. L. Mencken
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

H. L. Mencken
One of the chief objects of medicine is to save us from the natural consequences of our vices and follies. The moment it becomes moral it becomes quackery. A scientific physician should have no opinion about the ethical standards and deserts of his patient.

H. L. Mencken
Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.

H. L. Mencken
No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.

H. L. Mencken
In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.

H. L. Mencken