H.L. Mencken Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.
The university president who cashiered every professor unwilling to support Woodrow Wilson for the first vacancy in the
Trinity ...
Trinity ...
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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.
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.
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.
After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.
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.
War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
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.
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.