H.L. Mencken Quotes

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.

Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.

Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.

The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.

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

Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.

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.

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.

The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.

I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.

This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian Businessman.

Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.

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

I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.

A poet over 30 is pathetic

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

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

Man makes love by braggadocio, and woman makes love by listening.

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

Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors.

It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

It is only doubt that creates.

Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors; they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

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

There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic legend.

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.

The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.

Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.

The worshiper is the father of the gods.

When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.

He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.

No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.