Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.”

— H. L. Mencken

403. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

405. “A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.”

— H. L. Mencken

406. “War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

408. “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

409. “Puccini – silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

411. “Richard Strauss – Old Home Week in Gomorrah.”

— H. L. Mencken

412. “Any man who, having a child or children he can’t support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.”

— H. L. Mencken

413. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

415. “The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

419. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

422. “Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.”

— H. L. Mencken

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

427. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

429. “The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

431. “Qualsiasi persona normale di tanto in tanto prova la tentazione di sputarsi nelle mani, issare la bandiera nera e cominciare a tagliare le gole.”

— H. L. Mencken

432. “Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian Businessman.”

— H. L. Mencken

433. “Liberals have many tails and chase them all.”

— H. L. Mencken

434. “What is the professor’s function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.”

— H. L. Mencken

435. “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

436. “The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.”

— H. L. Mencken

437. “Morality is nothing but a struggle for safety.”

— H. L. Mencken

438. “Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.”

— H. L. Mencken

439. “I drink exactly as much as I want, and one drink more.”

— H. L. Mencken

440. “Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.”

— H. L. Mencken

441. “When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.”

— H. L. Mencken

442. “Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.”

— H. L. Mencken

443. “Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.”

— H. L. Mencken

444. “The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.”

— H. L. Mencken

445. “Genius: the ability to prolong one’s childhood.”

— H. L. Mencken

446. “When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.”

— H. L. Mencken

447. “The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.”

— H. L. Mencken

448. “The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.”

— H. L. Mencken

449. “Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.”

— H. L. Mencken

450. “Debussy – A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.”

— H. L. Mencken