H. L. Mencken Quotes

Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.

Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

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.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

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.

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

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

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.

Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Life is a dead-end street.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

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

All government, of course, is against liberty.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

Alimony – the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Time stays, we go.

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.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

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

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

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

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 see the toothache in his own humor.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.