Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said is that its cosmetic effect is good.”

— H. L. Mencken

152. “Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.”

— H. L. Mencken

153. “The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads.”

— H. L. Mencken

154. “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

155. “Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.”

— H. L. Mencken

156. “The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.”

— H. L. Mencken

157. “If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y.”

— H. L. Mencken

158. “After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.”

— H. L. Mencken

159. “One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.”

— H. L. Mencken

160. “The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.”

— H. L. Mencken

161. “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.”

— H. L. Mencken

162. “When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.”

— H. L. Mencken

163. “The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the privileges of the underprivileged.”

— H. L. Mencken

164. “One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.”

— H. L. Mencken

165. “Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.”

— H. L. Mencken

166. “No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.”

— H. L. Mencken

167. “There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.”

— H. L. Mencken

168. “The cynics are right nine times out of ten.”

— H. L. Mencken

169. “There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.”

— H. L. Mencken

170. “Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.”

— H. L. Mencken

171. “The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all other men are just as easy to fool.”

— H. L. Mencken

172. “High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.”

— H. L. Mencken

173. “Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.”

— H. L. Mencken

174. “Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn.”

— H. L. Mencken

175. “The dying man doesn’t struggle much and he isn’t much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.”

— H. L. Mencken

176. “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

177. “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

178. “The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.”

— H. L. Mencken

179. “For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.”

— H. L. Mencken

180. “All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.”

— H. L. Mencken

181. “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”

— H. L. Mencken

182. “A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.”

— H. L. Mencken

183. “Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.”

— H. L. Mencken

184. “Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.”

— H. L. Mencken

185. “Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.”

— H. L. Mencken

186. “No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.”

— H. L. Mencken

187. “There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

— H. L. Mencken

188. “Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.”

— H. L. Mencken

189. “He believed that there was need in the world for a class freed from the handicap of law and morality, a class acutely adaptable and immoral; a class bent on achieving, not the equality of all men, but the production, at the top, of the superman.”

— H. L. Mencken

190. “I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty.”

— H. L. Mencken

191. “All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.”

— H. L. Mencken

192. “Always remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.”

— H. L. Mencken

193. “The worshiper is the father of the gods.”

— H. L. Mencken

194. “Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another “Rosenkavailer.””

— H. L. Mencken

195. “No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”

— H. L. Mencken

196. “Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop.”

— H. L. Mencken

197. “The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.”

— H. L. Mencken

198. “The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.”

— H. L. Mencken

199. “I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.”

— H. L. Mencken

200. “The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.”

— H. L. Mencken