Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.”

— H. L. Mencken

304. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

307. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

309. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

315. “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

316. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

324. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

332. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

334. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

336. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

341. “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

342. “Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

— H. L. Mencken

343. “Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.”

— H. L. Mencken

344. “Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”

— H. L. Mencken

345. “The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

349. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken