Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

416. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

422. “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

423. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

425. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

428. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

430. “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

431. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

435. “All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, of Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.”

— H. L. Mencken

436. “Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors.”

— H. L. Mencken

437. “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

438. “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

439. “Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

441. “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

442. “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

443. “Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.”

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

445. “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

446. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

448. “Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.”

— H. L. Mencken

449. “Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.”

— H. L. Mencken

450. “Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.”

— H. L. Mencken