Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.”

— H. L. Mencken

353. “We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.”

— 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. “Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

359. “The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.”

— H. L. Mencken

360. “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

361. “In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

365. “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

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. “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

368. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

373. “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

374. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

376. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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385. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

387. “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

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

393. “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

394. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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399. “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

400. “A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.”

— H. L. Mencken