Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

353. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

356. “Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

358. “A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.”

— H. L. Mencken

359. “It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind.”

— H. L. Mencken

360. “Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.”

— H. L. Mencken

361. “It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

365. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

367. “It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.”

— H. L. Mencken

368. “What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.”

— H. L. Mencken

369. “There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.”

— H. L. Mencken

370. “The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man – say a Tennessee Holy Roller – is really very small.”

— H. L. Mencken

371. “I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.”

— H. L. Mencken

372. “The only time you have a free press is when you own one.”

— H. L. Mencken

373. “No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.”

— H. L. Mencken

374. “What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

376. “Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.”

— H. L. Mencken

377. “A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.”

— H. L. Mencken

378. “Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.”

— H. L. Mencken

379. “The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.”

— H. L. Mencken

380. “The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.”

— H. L. Mencken

381. “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

382. “One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.”

— H. L. Mencken

383. “The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.”

— H. L. Mencken

384. “There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

— H. L. Mencken

385. “I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.”

— H. L. Mencken

386. “Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.”

— H. L. Mencken

387. “To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.”

— H. L. Mencken

388. “The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.”

— H. L. Mencken

389. “Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.”

— H. L. Mencken

390. “So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.”

— H. L. Mencken

391. “Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.”

— H. L. Mencken

392. “Archbishop – A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.”

— H. L. Mencken

393. “Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor’s son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.”

— H. L. Mencken

394. “Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

— H. L. Mencken

395. “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

396. “It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him.”

— H. L. Mencken

397. “If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.”

— H. L. Mencken

398. “Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.”

— H. L. Mencken

399. “Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.”

— H. L. Mencken

400. “The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.”

— H. L. Mencken