H.L. Mencken Quotes

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

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

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.

Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.

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

Why do men go to zoos?

Wife: a former sweetheart.

Evil is that which one believes of others.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

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

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

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

Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

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

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general.

The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.

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

There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

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

There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it.

Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.

[Texas is] the place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest to see the least.

In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.

I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.

The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.

God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.

On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable.

Remorse - Regret that one waited so long to do it.

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.

If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.

The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.