Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.”

— H. L. Mencken

352. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

354. “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

355. “I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

358. “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

359. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

365. “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

366. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

368. “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

369. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

372. “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

373. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

375. “Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.”

— H. L. Mencken

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— 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. “The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

389. “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

390. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

392. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

398. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken