Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Anyhow, the hole in the donut is at least digestible.”

— H. L. Mencken

302. “The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

304. “A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.”

— H. L. Mencken

305. “Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.”

— H. L. Mencken

306. “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

— H. L. Mencken

307. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

310. “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

311. “I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

313. “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

314. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

316. “Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

318. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

320. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— H. L. Mencken

322. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

329. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

333. “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

334. “Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

336. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

337. “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

338. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

340. “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

341. “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.”

— H. L. Mencken

342. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

344. “If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.”

— H. L. Mencken

345. “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

346. “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

347. “A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor.”

— H. L. Mencken

348. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— H. L. Mencken

350. “The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.”

— H. L. Mencken