H.L. Mencken Quotes

H.L. Mencken Quotes

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.

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.

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

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

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.

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

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

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

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 girl.

If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

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

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

Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. 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.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

...the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

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

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.

When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.

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

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