A List of Famous H. L. Mencken Quotes By Reference

A list of quotes from H. L. Mencken. Here are the best H. L. Mencken quotes on various subjects. The H. L. Mencken quotations list is alphabetical but can be sorted by any column. Enjoy these sayings coined by H. L. Mencken. You may copy this list to make your own just like it, re-rank it to fit your opinions, then publish it to share with your friends.

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1

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

H. L. Mencken

Fame
2

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

H. L. Mencken

Christian Church
3

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

H. L. Mencken

Cynics and Cynicism
4

A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.

H. L. Mencken

Gentlemen
5

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

H. L. Mencken

Politicians and Politics
6

A judge is a law student who grades his own papers.

H. L. Mencken

Law and Lawyers
7

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.

H. L. Mencken

Men and Women
8

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

H. L. Mencken

Metaphysics
9

A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.

H. L. Mencken

Nun
10

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

H. L. Mencken

Alcohol and Alcoholism
11

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

H. L. Mencken

Originality
12

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

H. L. Mencken

Adultery
13

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

H. L. Mencken

Quotation
14

Alimony -- the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

H. L. Mencken

Alimony
15

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

H. L. Mencken

Ideals and Idealism
16

Archbishop -- A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

H. L. Mencken

Christian Church
17

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

H. L. Mencken

Heart
18

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.

H. L. Mencken

Bachelor
19

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.

H. L. Mencken

Bachelor
20

Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks it is seldom necessary to assume.

H. L. Mencken

Speakers and Speaking
21

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

H. L. Mencken

Conscience
22

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

H. L. Mencken

Conscience
23

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

Critics and Criticism
24

Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy
25

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy
26

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

H. L. Mencken

Decency
27

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

H. L. Mencken

Family
28

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H. L. Mencken

Faith
29

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Problem
30

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

H. L. Mencken

Marriage
31

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

H. L. Mencken

Voting
32

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.

H. L. Mencken

God
33

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

H. L. Mencken

Government
34

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

H. L. Mencken

Humankind
35

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

H. L. Mencken

History and Historians
36

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

H. L. Mencken

Honour
37

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

H. L. Mencken

Suffering
38

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

H. L. Mencken

Husband
39

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

H. L. Mencken

Hygiene
40

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

Liberty
41

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

H. L. Mencken

Truth
42

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy
43

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

H. L. Mencken

Action
44

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

H. L. Mencken
45

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

H. L. Mencken

Writers and Writing
46

If I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.

H. L. Mencken

Marriage
47

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

H. L. Mencken

Trust
48

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

H. L. Mencken

Heroes and Heroism
49

Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.

H. L. Mencken

Justice
50

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

H. L. Mencken

Belief
51

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.

H. L. Mencken
52

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

H. L. Mencken

Evolution
53

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

H. L. Mencken

Truth
54

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

Bachelor
55

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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

H. L. Mencken

Imagination
56

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

H. L. Mencken

Critics and Criticism
57

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

H. L. Mencken

Birth control
58

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

H. L. Mencken

Certainty
59

Legend : a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

H. L. Mencken

Legend
60

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

H. L. Mencken

Colleges and Universities
61

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

H. L. Mencken

Choice
62

Life is a dead-end street.

H. L. Mencken

Life and Living
63

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

H. L. Mencken

Love
64

Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.

H. L. Mencken

Love
65

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

H. L. Mencken

Love
66

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

Lies and Lying
67

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

H. L. Mencken

Humankind
68

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

H. L. Mencken

Men and Women
69

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

H. L. Mencken

Men and Women
70

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

H. L. Mencken

Doubt
71

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later, for another thing, they die earlier.

H. L. Mencken

Men and Women
72

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Morality
73

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

H. L. Mencken

Safety
74

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

H. L. Mencken

Flirting
75

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

H. L. Mencken

Wisdom
76

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

H. L. Mencken
77

No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.

H. L. Mencken

Farming and Farmers
78

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

H. L. Mencken

Politicians and Politics
79

On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.

H. L. Mencken

Agreement
80

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

H. L. Mencken

Laughter
81

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

Prejudice
82

Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

H. L. Mencken

Opera
83

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

H. L. Mencken

Philosophers and Philosophy
84

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H. L. Mencken

Puritans
85

Remorse is regret that one waited so long to do it.

H. L. Mencken

Remorse
86

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

H. L. Mencken

Law and Lawyers
87

School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.

H. L. Mencken

School
88

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

H. L. Mencken

Self-respect
89

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

H. L. Mencken

Husband
90

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

H. L. Mencken

Temptation
91

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

H. L. Mencken

Pleasure
92

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

H. L. Mencken

Humankind
93

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

H. L. Mencken

Books and Reading
94

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

H. L. Mencken

Money
95

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

H. L. Mencken

Crime and Criminals
96

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy
97

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

H. L. Mencken

Incredulity
98

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

H. L. Mencken

Cynics and Cynicism
99

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

H. L. Mencken

Morality
100

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

H. L. Mencken

Solutions

Showing items 1 - 25 of 133

A List of Famous H. L. Mencken Quotes you can use this list to help make your own ranked list about this topic

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

A judge is a law student who grades his own papers.

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Alimony -- the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

Archbishop -- A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.

Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks it is seldom necessary to assume.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

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

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

If I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

Legend : a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

Life is a dead-end street.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later, for another thing, they die earlier.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

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.