Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Why do men go to zoos?”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

203. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

218. “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

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. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

223. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

226. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

229. “Every man is his own hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

234. “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

235. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

239. “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

240. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

246. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

248. “The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

— H. L. Mencken

249. “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

250. “Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.”

— H. L. Mencken