Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

204. “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

205. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

207. “Why do men go to zoos?”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

210. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

216. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

225. “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

226. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

230. “God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, and the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; he will set them above their betters.”

— H. L. Mencken

231. “Every man is his own hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

232. “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

233. “The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

238. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

243. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

246. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

248. “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

249. “Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.”

— H. L. Mencken

250. “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