Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

355. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

357. “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

358. “Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.”

— H. L. Mencken

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

363. “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

364. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “Popularity – The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

372. “In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.”

— H. L. Mencken

373. “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

374. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

377. “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

378. “I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.”

— H. L. Mencken

379. “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

380. “Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— 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. “Chopin – Two embalmers at work upon a minor poetthe scent of tuberosesAutumn rain.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

385. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

387. “It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.”

— H. L. Mencken

388. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

391. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

393. “Never drink if you’ve got any work to do. Never.”

— H. L. Mencken

394. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

396. “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

397. “The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.”

— H. L. Mencken

398. “The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.”

— H. L. Mencken

399. “Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories.”

— H. L. Mencken

400. “Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.”

— H. L. Mencken