H.L. Mencken quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from H.L. Mencken on Wise Famous Quotes.

Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.

Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.

A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.

The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians
and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

Anyhow, the hole in the donut is at least digestible.

I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.

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

You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing.

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.

Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.

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.

Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.

Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

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

I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.

A poet over 30 is pathetic

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

There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.

Wealth - any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.

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

Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.

For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.

No politician is ever benefited by saving money; it is spending it that makes him.

The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted

The university president who cashiered every professor unwilling to support Woodrow Wilson for the first vacancy in the
Trinity ...

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

Believing passionately in the palpably not true ... is the chief occupation of mankind.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

I have seen something of the horrors of war, and much too much of the worse horrors of peace.

Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

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

Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or at a man.

The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.

The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the privileges of the underprivileged.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.

Evil is that which one believes of others.

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

The best client is a scared millionaire.

Never underestimate the booberie of the booboisie.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Love is the mistaken belief that one woman differs from another.

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

After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.

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

How to Drink Like a Gentleman: The Things to Do and the Things Not To, as Learned in 30 Years' Extensive Research.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.

The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.

War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.

The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all other men are just as easy to fool.

There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.

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

It is only doubt that creates.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.

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

Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.

Every man is his own hell.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.

Time stays, we go.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

There are two kinds of music; German music and bad music.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

There is no record in the history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself.

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.

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

Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness

If I ever mary, it will be on a suddn impulse - as aman shoots himself

In the duel of sex, woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.