Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

204. “Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.”

— H. L. Mencken

205. “Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”

— H. L. Mencken

206. “The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

209. “What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.”

— H. L. Mencken

210. “The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.”

— H. L. Mencken

211. “It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”

— H. L. Mencken

212. “There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out.”

— H. L. Mencken

213. “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

— H. L. Mencken

214. “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.”

— H. L. Mencken

215. “The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors; they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.”

— H. L. Mencken

216. “Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.”

— H. L. Mencken

217. “A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.”

— H. L. Mencken

218. “A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.”

— H. L. Mencken

219. “Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.”

— H. L. Mencken

220. “Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.”

— H. L. Mencken

221. “As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.”

— H. L. Mencken

222. “No doubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an infection of Beethovens would not think it worth while to send for the doctor. But a cosmos infested by Socialists, Scotsmen and stockbrokers must suffer damnably. No wonder the sun is so hot and the moon is so diabetically green.”

— H. L. Mencken

223. “He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.”

— H. L. Mencken

224. “Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.”

— H. L. Mencken

225. “Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.”

— H. L. Mencken

226. “I’m ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.”

— H. L. Mencken

227. “It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.”

— H. L. Mencken

228. “Every man is his own hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

229. “The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.”

— H. L. Mencken

230. “All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.”

— H. L. Mencken

231. “If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.”

— H. L. Mencken

232. “People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.”

— H. L. Mencken

233. “It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”

— H. L. Mencken

234. “To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.”

— H. L. Mencken

235. “In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.”

— H. L. Mencken

236. “All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

— H. L. Mencken

237. “Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.”

— H. L. Mencken

238. “Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.”

— H. L. Mencken

239. “A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.”

— H. L. Mencken

240. “In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.”

— H. L. Mencken

241. “The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries – as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them – but because it was far more poetical.”

— H. L. Mencken

242. “An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor’s children devoured by wolves.”

— H. L. Mencken

243. “The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.”

— H. L. Mencken

244. “The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

— H. L. Mencken

245. “The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

247. “A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.”

— H. L. Mencken

248. “I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”

— H. L. Mencken

249. “Osteopath – One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.”

— H. L. Mencken

250. “Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.”

— H. L. Mencken