H. L. Mencken - Man Quotes

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Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

H. L. Mencken
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

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
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.

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
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

H. L. Mencken
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

H. L. Mencken
Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy—a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose.

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

H. L. Mencken
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

H. L. Mencken
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

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
An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it.

H. L. Mencken
An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in.

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
The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.

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

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
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 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
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 sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.

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
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

H. L. Mencken
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.

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
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
What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.

H. L. Mencken
A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.

H. L. Mencken
A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.

H. L. Mencken