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H. L. Mencken

225 quotes

• “Herein lies the value of free speech. It makes concealment difficult, and, in the long run, impossible. One heretic, if he is right, is as good as a host. He is bound to win in the long run. It is thus no wonder that foes of the enlightenment always begin their proceedings by trying to deny free speech to their opponents. It is dangerous to them and they know it. So they have at it by accusing these opponents of all sorts of grave crimes and misdemeanors, most of them clearly absurd – in other words, by calling them names and trying to scare them.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Sad Case of Tennessee in the Chicago Tribune (March 14, 1926)

• “Here is tragedy—and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: More Tips for Novelists" in the Chicago Tribune (2 May 1926)

• “The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chicago Tribune (23 May 1926)

• “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. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Baltimore Evening Sun (9 August 1926)

• “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: 'Notes On Journalism' in the Chicago Tribune (19 September 1926)

• “It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Notes on Democracy (1926), Part II, p. 99

• “Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Notes on Democracy (1926)

• “Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Baltimore Evening Sun (4 April 1927)

• “No man ever entered the White House under the burden of a more inconvenient past. And no President was ever denounced with greater ferocity. -- said of Andrew Jackson”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review of Andrew Jackson: An Epic in Homespun by Gerald W. Johnson, The American Mercury, March 1928, pp. 382-383 (March 1928)

• “There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he usually says, in substance, is this: "Let us trust in God, who has always fooled us in the past.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God - that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ostensibly he is an altruist devoted whole-heartedly to the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly public-spirited that his private interest is nothing to him. Actually, he is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole aim in life is to butter his parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an armamentarium of deceits. It is his business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying he will hold it by lying. if lying peters out he will try and hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences. It is moral to change convictions overnight. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything is a party of liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just as despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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, or 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 (1880–1956) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Calamity of Appomattox," The American Mercury (September 1930)

• “Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What I Believe" in The Forum 84 (September 1930), p. 136

• “The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Treatise on the Gods (1930), pp. 345-346

• “What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The American Mercury (May 1933), p. 136

• “If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The American Mercury (March 1936) - referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt

• “Fascism is not likely to be identical with the kinds on tap in Germany, Italy and Russia; indeed, it is very apt to come in under the name of anti-Fascism.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Baltimore Sun “Of The People, By The People,” (Nov. 6, 1938), p. 8.

• “No man can get anywhere in this world in any really and endurable manner without some recourse to books.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Evening Sun (1939) in an editorial calling for adequate financial support for the Pratt Library; affixed to the wall inside the entrance to the Enoch Pratt Free Library Branch 2

• “It might have been more judicious to omit these portraits [of the dictionary's editors], for 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 (1880–1956) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Nation, October 17, 1934, Volume 139, Number 3615, pp. 450-451, "The New Webster," by H. L. Mencken.

• “When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1899 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Newspaper Days: 1899-1906 (1941)

• “In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in LIFE magazine, Vol. 21, No. 6, (5 August 1946), p. 52; this has also been paraphrased as "It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decenc…

• “A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in LIFE magazine, Vol. 21, No. 6, (5 August 1946), p. 48

• “I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in Letters of H. L. Mencken (1961) edited by Guy J. Forgue, p. xiii

• “I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor — Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: H.L. Mencken : Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work (1994) , p. 190; this work was written in 1941-1942 but sealed until 1991.

• “Nature abhors a moron.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Platitude — An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Self-respect — The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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