H. L. Mencken's Quotes

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

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

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

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

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

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.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

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

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

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

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

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

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

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

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

Life is a dead-end street.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

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

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

Every man is his own hell.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

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

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

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.

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

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.

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

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.