Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “Morality is nothing but a struggle for safety.”

— H. L. Mencken

456. “All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, of Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

459. “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

460. “No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.”

— H. L. Mencken

461. “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

462. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— 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. “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

467. “Debussy – A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.”

— H. L. Mencken

468. “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

469. “The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.”

— H. L. Mencken

470. “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

471. “Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.”

— H. L. Mencken

472. “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

473. “Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.”

— H. L. Mencken

474. “Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.”

— H. L. Mencken

475. “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

476. “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

— H. L. Mencken

477. “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

478. “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

479. “Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.”

— H. L. Mencken

480. “Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.”

— H. L. Mencken

481. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

487. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

489. “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

490. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

496. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

498. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

500. “Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.”

— H. L. Mencken