H. L. Mencken Quotes

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
H. L. Mencken

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
H. L. Mencken

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
H. L. Mencken

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
H. L. Mencken

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
H. L. Mencken

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
H. L. Mencken

Life is a dead-end street.
H. L. Mencken

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
H. L. Mencken

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. Mencken

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H. L. Mencken

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
H. L. Mencken

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
H. L. Mencken

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

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
H. L. Mencken

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
H. L. Mencken

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
H. L. Mencken

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
H. L. Mencken

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H. L. Mencken

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
H. L. Mencken

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.
H. L. Mencken

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
H. L. Mencken

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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

No one in this world 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

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent-slimy, sneaking and abominable.
H. L. Mencken

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
H. L. Mencken

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
H. L. Mencken

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H. L. Mencken

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
H. L. Mencken

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
H. L. Mencken

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
H. L. Mencken

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
H. L. Mencken

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
H. L. Mencken

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
H. L. Mencken

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
H. L. Mencken

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
H. L. Mencken

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H. L. Mencken

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist, Jack.
H. L. Mencken

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
H. L. Mencken

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?
H. L. Mencken

The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
H. L. Mencken

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
H. L. Mencken

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
H. L. Mencken

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