Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.”

— H. L. Mencken

452. “The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.”

— H. L. Mencken

453. “The net effect of Clarence Darrow’s great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.”

— H. L. Mencken

454. “The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.”

— H. L. Mencken

455. “If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

— H. L. Mencken

456. “Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.”

— H. L. Mencken

457. “Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.”

— H. L. Mencken

458. “No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.”

— H. L. Mencken

459. “So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.”

— H. L. Mencken

460. “To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.”

— H. L. Mencken

461. “Goverment is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are the most tolerable are arbitary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.”

— H. L. Mencken

462. “When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.”

— H. L. Mencken

463. “Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.”

— H. L. Mencken

464. “If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.”

— H. L. Mencken

465. “All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.”

— H. L. Mencken

466. “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

467. “The worst government is the most moral.”

— H. L. Mencken

468. “On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable.”

— H. L. Mencken

469. “Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

470. “There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.”

— H. L. Mencken

471. “Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done – a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.”

— H. L. Mencken

472. “Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.”

— H. L. Mencken

473. “Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness.”

— H. L. Mencken

474. “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

475. “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

476. “Any man who, having a child or children he can’t support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.”

— H. L. Mencken

477. “How do they taste? They taste like more.”

— H. L. Mencken

478. “Fame: an embalmer trembling with stage fright.”

— H. L. Mencken

479. “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

480. “The average schoolmaster is, and always must be, an ass.”

— H. L. Mencken

481. “The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-by to the Bill of Rights.”

— H. L. Mencken

482. “A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn’t remember any time that he wasn’t, has almost no hatred for the religious.”

— H. L. Mencken

483. “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

484. “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

485. “What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.”

— H. L. Mencken

486. “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

487. “The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.”

— H. L. Mencken

488. “We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.”

— H. L. Mencken

489. “Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.”

— H. L. Mencken

490. “During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.”

— H. L. Mencken

491. “The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.”

— H. L. Mencken

492. “I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.”

— H. L. Mencken

493. “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

494. “The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.”

— H. L. Mencken

495. “The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.”

— H. L. Mencken

496. “No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.”

— H. L. Mencken

497. “Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.”

— H. L. Mencken

498. “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

499. “It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.”

— H. L. Mencken

500. “Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.”

— H. L. Mencken