H. L. Mencken Quotes

529 Sourced Quotes

Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

H. L. Mencken
The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

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
Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them.

H. L. Mencken
A man seldom puts his authentic self into a letter. He writes it to amuse a friend or to get rid of a social or business obligation, which is to say, a nuisance.

H. L. Mencken
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

H. L. Mencken
Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.

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 penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

H. L. Mencken
Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.

H. L. Mencken
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.

H. L. Mencken
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

H. L. Mencken
The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

H. L. Mencken
Archbishop – A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

H. L. Mencken
It is the sex instinct that makes women seem beautiful, which they are only once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.

H. L. Mencken
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

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

H. L. Mencken
Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it.

H. L. Mencken
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.

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
The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money. No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.

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
Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

H. L. Mencken
No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

H. L. Mencken
I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.

H. L. Mencken
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken
Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.

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
Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

H. L. Mencken