H.L. Mencken Quotes

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

To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.

My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.

America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.

People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.

An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's children devoured by wolves.

Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.

War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.

The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties

Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.

It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.

Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.

One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.

The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

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

The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.

Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.

The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.

What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it.

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

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

Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.

One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.

The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.

There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.

If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.

Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.

The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.

The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

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

Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.

Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas

Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.

No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

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