Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

303. “They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.”

— H. L. Mencken

304. “A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.”

— H. L. Mencken

305. “A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.”

— H. L. Mencken

306. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

315. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

317. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

319. “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

320. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

322. “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

323. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

325. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

329. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

331. “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

332. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

334. “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

336. “Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”

— H. L. Mencken

337. “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

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

— 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. “Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

343. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

345. “In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.”

— 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. “No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken