H.L. Mencken Quotes

Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
H.L. Mencken
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
H.L. Mencken
Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy.
H.L. Mencken
Time is a great legalizer even in the field of morals.
H.L. Mencken
Time is a great legalizer even in the fields of morals.
H.L. Mencken
We are here and it is now. Further than that all knowledge is moonshine.
H.L. Mencken
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
H.L. Mencken
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
H.L. Mencken
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself.
H.L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H.L. Mencken
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.
H.L. Mencken
Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
H.L. Mencken
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
Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
H.L. Mencken
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
H.L. Mencken
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H.L. Mencken
Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H.L. Mencken
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself.
H.L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H.L. Mencken
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.
H.L. Mencken
Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
H.L. Mencken
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
Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
H.L. Mencken
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
H.L. Mencken
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
H.L. Mencken
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H.L. Mencken
Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H.L. Mencken
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.
H.L. Mencken
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
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
H.L. Mencken
If after I depart this vale you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
H.L. Mencken
No matter how happily a woman may be married it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.
H.L. Mencken
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
H.L. Mencken
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H.L. Mencken
Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.
H.L. Mencken
Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
H.L. Mencken
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.
H.L. Mencken
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.
H.L. Mencken
God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
H.L. Mencken
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
H.L. Mencken
What men value in the world is not rights but privileges.
H.L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.
H.L. Mencken
Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.
H.L. Mencken
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H.L. Mencken
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with - even if he drank.
H.L. Mencken
It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.
H.L. Mencken
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.
H.L. Mencken
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
H.L. Mencken
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H.L. Mencken
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.
H.L. Mencken
Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
H.L. Mencken
Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.
H.L. Mencken
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
H.L. Mencken
Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.
H.L. Mencken
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H.L. Mencken
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H.L. Mencken
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
H.L. Mencken
The best client is a scared millionaire.
H.L. Mencken