Famous Hl Mencken Quotations

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"The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated."
by H.L. Mencken
"For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end."
by H.L. Mencken
"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."
by H.L. Mencken
"A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know."
by H.L. Mencken
"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."
by H.L. Mencken
"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
by H.L. Mencken
"There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility."
by H.L. Mencken
"There is no record in history of a happy philosopher."
by 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."
by H.L. Mencken
"Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own."
by H.L. Mencken
"A judge is a law student who marks their own examination papers."
by H.L. Mencken
"A home is not a mere transient shelter its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it."
by H.L. Mencken
"A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."
by H.L. Mencken
"All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else."
by H.L. Mencken
"All zoos actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling."
by H.L. Mencken
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
by H.L. Mencken
"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."
by H.L. Mencken
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking."
by H.L. Mencken
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
by H.L. Mencken
"For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution and it is always wrong"
by H.L. Mencken
"Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable."
by H.L. Mencken
"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."
by H.L. Mencken
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."
by H.L. Mencken
"JUDGE, n A law student who marks his own papers."
by H.L. Mencken
"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
by H.L. Mencken
"Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists."
by H.L. Mencken
"Misogynist A man who hates women as much as women hate one another."
by H.L. Mencken
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
by H.L. Mencken
"Platitude an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true."
by H.L. Mencken
"Puritanism The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
by H.L. Mencken
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office."
by H.L. Mencken
"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
by H.L. Mencken
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
by H.L. Mencken
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
by H.L. Mencken
"To die for an idea it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true"
by H.L. Mencken
"We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine."
by H.L. Mencken
"We must respect the other fellow's religion,but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
by H.L. Mencken
"The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, and not fostered."
by H.L. Mencken
"Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods"
by H.L. Mencken
"Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love"
by H.L. Mencken
"Dachshund: A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long"
by H.L. Mencken
"Archbishop -- A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ."
by H.L. Mencken
"A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology."
by H.L. Mencken
"A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark."
by H.L. Mencken
"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"
by H.L. Mencken
"When women kiss it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands"
by H.L. Mencken
"When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox"
by H.L. Mencken
"To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment"
by H.L. Mencken
"There are two kinds of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read"
by H.L. Mencken
"There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries for dinner."
by H.L. Mencken
"There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli."
by H.L. Mencken
"The surest way to get on in politics in America is to play the leading part in a prosecution which attracts public notice"
by H.L. Mencken
"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"
by H.L. Mencken
"The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them."
by H.L. Mencken
"The idea that (school-children) are happy is of a piece with the idea that the lobster in the pot is happy"
by H.L. Mencken
"The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it"
by H.L. Mencken
"Self-respect The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious"
by H.L. Mencken
"School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence."
by H.L. Mencken
"Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it"
by H.L. Mencken
"Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian business man"
by H.L. Mencken
"Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian."
by H.L. Mencken
"No one in this world, so far as I know has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people"
by 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"
by H.L. Mencken
"Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne."
by H.L. Mencken
"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."
by H.L. Mencken
"Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead"
by H.L. Mencken
"If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x X y is less than y"
by H.L. Mencken
"If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier - and also a good deal more foolish"
by H.L. Mencken
"I have yet to meet (a socialist) who was not as gullible as a Mississippi darkey - nay, as a Mississippi white man"
by H.L. Mencken
"I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries"
by H.L. Mencken
"Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm"
by H.L. Mencken
"Americans never recognize an idea unless it has white wings or a forked tail."
by H.L. Mencken, 1920s
"Bachelors have consciences. Married men have wives."
by H.L. Mencken
"At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with ..."
by H.L. Mencken
"Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are marrie..."
by H.L. Mencken
"Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, and its salient..."
by H.L. Mencken
"I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by..."
by 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 g..."
by H.L. Mencken
"It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed hi..."
by H.L. Mencken
"Popularity—The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands."
by H.L. Mencken
"The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mind fogs. His wi..."
by H.L. Mencken
"There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could..."
by H.L. Mencken
"When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A."
by H.L. Mencken
"When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife."
by H.L. Mencken


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