Top 500 H. L. Mencken Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh.”

— H. L. Mencken

402. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

408. “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

409. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

412. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

415. “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

416. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

419. “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

420. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

422. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

427. “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

428. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

430. “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

431. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

434. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

436. “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

437. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

439. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

447. “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

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. “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

450. “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