H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

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
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
For a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas.

H. L. Mencken
Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

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
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

H. L. Mencken
I roll out of my couch every morning with the more agreeable expectations.

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
No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

H. L. Mencken
Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

H. L. Mencken
The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.

H. L. Mencken
Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

H. L. Mencken
No politician is ever benefited by saving money; it is spending it that makes him.

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
The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers.

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
What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

H. L. Mencken
No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket's confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.

H. L. Mencken
A sound American is simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts and questionings, and who accepts instantly, and as incontrovertible gospel, the whole body of official doctrine of his day, whatever it may be and no matter how often it may change. The instant he challenges it, no matter how timorously and academically, he ceases by that much to be a loyal and creditable citizen of the republic.

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

H. L. Mencken
In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.

H. L. Mencken
It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.

H. L. Mencken
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

H. L. Mencken
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.

H. L. Mencken
No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

H. L. Mencken
The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-called Liberals. They believe in each and every quack who sets up his booth inthe fairgrounds, including the Communists. The Communists have some talents too, but they always fall short of believing in the Liberals.

H. L. Mencken
One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

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 verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.

H. L. Mencken
Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull

H. L. Mencken