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

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

— H. L. Mencken

405. “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

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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

412. “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

413. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

415. “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

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 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

418. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

420. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

424. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

428. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

435. “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

436. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

441. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.”

— H. L. Mencken

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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