Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop.”

— H. L. Mencken

202. “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

203. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

205. “Why do men go to zoos?”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

208. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

214. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

224. “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

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

229. “Every man is his own hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

232. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

236. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken