Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.”

— H. L. Mencken

152. “No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.”

— H. L. Mencken

153. “Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.”

— H. L. Mencken

154. “All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.”

— H. L. Mencken

155. “A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.”

— H. L. Mencken

156. “The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.”

— H. L. Mencken

157. “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

— H. L. Mencken

158. “The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker’s grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

159. “Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

— H. L. Mencken

160. “I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.”

— H. L. Mencken

161. “The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.”

— H. L. Mencken

162. “Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”

— H. L. Mencken

163. “I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

173. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

175. “Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

177. “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

178. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

181. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

183. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

192. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

196. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

199. “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

200. “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