Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars.”

— H. L. Mencken

352. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

354. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

356. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

358. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

367. “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

368. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

371. “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

372. “The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.”

— H. L. Mencken

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

379. “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

380. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

383. “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

384. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

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. “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

395. “It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.”

— H. L. Mencken

396. “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

— H. L. Mencken

397. “I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.”

— H. L. Mencken

398. “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

399. “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

400. “The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.”

— H. L. Mencken