H. L. Mencken Quotes
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201. “Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

203. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

208. “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

209. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

211. “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

212. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

214. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

219. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

223. “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

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. “Every man is his own hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

226. “Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

229. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

232. “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

233. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

235. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

237. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

239. “The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

— H. L. Mencken

240. “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

241. “Whenever “A” attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon “B,” “A” is most likely a scoundrel.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

243. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

245. “The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.”

— H. L. Mencken

246. “When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

248. “The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

— H. L. Mencken

249. “The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.”

— H. L. Mencken

250. “The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”

— H. L. Mencken