Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

410. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

413. “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

414. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

418. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

420. “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

421. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

423. “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

424. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

426. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

428. “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

429. “The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh.”

— H. L. Mencken

430. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

433. “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

434. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— 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. “One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.”

— H. L. Mencken

443. “When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.”

— H. L. Mencken

444. “The net effect of Clarence Darrow’s great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.”

— H. L. Mencken

445. “No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.”

— H. L. Mencken

446. “Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent – slimy, sneaking and abominable.”

— H. L. Mencken

447. “Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.”

— H. L. Mencken

448. “No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken