Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Change is not progress.”

— H. L. Mencken

52. “The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.”

— H. L. Mencken

53. “Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.”

— H. L. Mencken

54. “On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.”

— H. L. Mencken

55. “The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.”

— H. L. Mencken

56. “The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians – and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.”

— H. L. Mencken

57. “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

— H. L. Mencken

58. “Alimony – the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.”

— H. L. Mencken

59. “The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.”

— H. L. Mencken

60. “After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.”

— H. L. Mencken

61. “Most people want security in this world, not liberty.”

— H. L. Mencken

62. “Haste is of the devil. Slowness is of God.”

— H. L. Mencken

63. “Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.”

— H. L. Mencken

64. “I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.”

— H. L. Mencken

65. “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.”

— H. L. Mencken

66. “Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.”

— H. L. Mencken

67. “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

— H. L. Mencken

68. “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

69. “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

70. “Dachshund: A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.”

— H. L. Mencken

71. “The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”

— H. L. Mencken

72. “Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.”

— H. L. Mencken

73. “Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.”

— H. L. Mencken

74. “Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.”

— H. L. Mencken

75. “Elections are futures markets in stolen property.”

— H. L. Mencken

76. “An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”

— H. L. Mencken

77. “School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.”

— H. L. Mencken

78. “The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.”

— H. L. Mencken

79. “A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.”

— H. L. Mencken

80. “The common man is a fool.”

— H. L. Mencken

81. “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

82. “Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

83. “The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.”

— H. L. Mencken

84. “Nature abhors a moron.”

— H. L. Mencken

85. “Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

— H. L. Mencken

86. “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

87. “The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.”

— H. L. Mencken

88. “Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”

— H. L. Mencken

89. “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

90. “A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general.”

— H. L. Mencken

91. “A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.”

— H. L. Mencken

92. “Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.”

— H. L. Mencken

93. “If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”

— H. L. Mencken

94. “There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.”

— H. L. Mencken

95. “The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.”

— H. L. Mencken

96. “We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.”

— H. L. Mencken

97. “Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.”

— H. L. Mencken

98. “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched 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.”

— H. L. Mencken

99. “All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.”

— H. L. Mencken

100. “The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.”

— H. L. Mencken