Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.”

— H. L. Mencken

302. “Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.”

— H. L. Mencken

303. “To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse.”

— H. L. Mencken

304. “Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.”

— H. L. Mencken

305. “The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.”

— H. L. Mencken

306. “The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility – this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.”

— H. L. Mencken

307. “Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.”

— H. L. Mencken

308. “The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.”

— H. L. Mencken

309. “The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.”

— H. L. Mencken

310. “Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.”

— H. L. Mencken

311. “Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.”

— H. L. Mencken

312. “Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.”

— H. L. Mencken

313. “There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.”

— H. L. Mencken

314. “This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.”

— H. L. Mencken

315. “If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say.”

— H. L. Mencken

316. “I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, and that the democratic government is at least as bad as any of the other forms.”

— H. L. Mencken

317. “The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.”

— H. L. Mencken

318. “One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.”

— H. L. Mencken

319. “Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.”

— H. L. Mencken

320. “Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.”

— H. L. Mencken

321. “A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.”

— H. L. Mencken

322. “Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.”

— H. L. Mencken

323. “A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.”

— H. L. Mencken

324. “The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.”

— H. L. Mencken

325. “The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.”

— H. L. Mencken

326. “Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.”

— H. L. Mencken

327. “War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.”

— H. L. Mencken

328. “What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?”

— H. L. Mencken

329. “To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.”

— H. L. Mencken

330. “Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.”

— H. L. Mencken

331. “New York: A third-rate Babylon.”

— H. L. Mencken

332. “The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.”

— H. L. Mencken

333. “The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.”

— H. L. Mencken

334. “The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.”

— H. L. Mencken

335. “One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.”

— H. L. Mencken

336. “It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.”

— H. L. Mencken

337. “Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.”

— H. L. Mencken

338. “Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?”

— H. L. Mencken

339. “To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said – there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

— H. L. Mencken

340. “Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.”

— H. L. Mencken

341. “Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.”

— H. L. Mencken

342. “Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.”

— H. L. Mencken

343. “Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.”

— H. L. Mencken

344. “We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.”

— H. L. Mencken

345. “In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars.”

— H. L. Mencken

346. “I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.”

— H. L. Mencken

347. “No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket’s confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.”

— H. L. Mencken

348. “The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.”

— H. L. Mencken

349. “I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.”

— H. L. Mencken

350. “The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.”

— H. L. Mencken