H. L. Mencken Quotes
Page 4 of 10

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

— H. L. Mencken

152. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

157. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

160. “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

161. “There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.”

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

— H. L. Mencken

164. “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

165. “A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

167. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

169. “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

170. “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

171. “The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

173. “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

174. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

180. “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

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. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

185. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

188. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

191. “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

192. “You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

194. “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin or when he sees silver he looks for the cloud it lines. A wise happy person does the exact opposite.”

— H. L. Mencken

195. “Why do men go to zoos?”

— H. L. Mencken

196. “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

197. “Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.”

— H. L. Mencken

198. “Justice is what you get when you run out of money.”

— H. L. Mencken

199. “A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.”

— H. L. Mencken

200. “Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.”

— H. L. Mencken