Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— 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. “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

362. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

364. “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

365. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

367. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

370. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

378. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

380. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

391. “The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.”

— H. L. Mencken

392. “The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket.”

— H. L. Mencken

393. “Citizenship in New York is now worth no more than citizenship in Arkansas, for it is open to any applicant from the marshes of Bessarabia, and, still worse, to any applicant from Arkansas.”

— H. L. Mencken

394. “There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.”

— H. L. Mencken

395. “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

396. “It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.”

— H. L. Mencken

397. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

399. “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

400. “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