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H. L. Mencken

225 quotes

“Truth — Something somehow discreditable to someone.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Historian — An unsuccessful novelist.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Christian — One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Judge — A law student who marks his own examination-papers.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jury — A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Theology — An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? A: Why do men go to zoos?”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When women kiss, it always reminds one of prize-fighters shaking hands.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact that what are commonly spoken of as rights are often really privileges is demonstrated in the case of the Jews. They resent bitterly their exclusion from certain hotels, resorts and other places of gathering, and make determined efforts to horn in. But the moment any considerable number of them horns in, the attractions of the place diminish, and the more pushful Jews turn to one where they are still nicht gewuenscht.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am one of the few Goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other Goyim. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right...The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source