H.L. Mencken Quotes
Funny Quotes by H.L. Mencken

Marriage is a wonderful institution,
but who would want to live in an institution?
- H. L. Mencken

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
- H. L. Mencken

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
- H. L. Mencken

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that
he has descended from man.
- H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- H. L. Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
- H. L. Mencken

For every complex problem,
there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- H.L. Mencken

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

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
- H. L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always
a false front for the urge to rule.
- H. L. Mencken

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers,
looks around for a coffin.
- 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.
- H. L. Mencken

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
- H. L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief
in the occurrence of the improbable.
- H. L. Mencken

For centuries, theologians have been explaining
the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
- H. L. Mencken

The believing mind is eternally impervious to evidence.
- H. L. Mencken

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

The worst government is often the most moral.
One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane.
But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
- H. L. Mencken

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
- H. L. Mencken

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband
a month before she marries him
and what she thinks of him a year afterward,
and you will have the truth about him.
- H. L. Mencken

Life is a constant oscillation
between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
- H. L. Mencken

Puritanism. The haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H. L. Mencken

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
- H. L. Mencken

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.
- H. L. Mencken

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person
to reconcile himself to the idea that
after all God will not help him
- 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.
- H. L. Mencken

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for;
as for me,
I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
- H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise,
just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine
it run by a board of gods.
- H. L. Mencken

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie.
I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave.
And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
- H.L. Mencken

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

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
- 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.
- H. L. Mencken

Bachelors know more about women than married men;
if they didn't they'd be married too.
- H. L. Mencken

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy,
but that it is a bore.
It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
- H. L. Mencken

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
- 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.
- H. L. Mencken

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
- H. L. Mencken

Every man is his own hell.
- H. L. Mencken

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
- H. L. Mencken

A man may be a fool and not know it,
but not if he is married.
- H. L. Mencken

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
- H. L. Mencken

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

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes
sports hates common sense.
- H. L. Mencken

If women believed in their husbands they would be a
good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
- H. L. Mencken

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

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
- H. L. Mencken

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

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country,
it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
- H. L. Mencken

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in
terms of the not worth knowing.
- H. L. Mencken

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
- H. L. Mencken

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

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
- H. L. Mencken

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.
- H. L. Mencken

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

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with,
even if he drank.
- H. L. Mencken

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
- H. L. Mencken

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
- H. L. Mencken

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
- H. L. Mencken

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage,
concludes that it will also make better soup.
- 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 see the toothache in his own humor.
- H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want,
and deserve to get it good and hard.
- H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
- H. L. Mencken

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker,
but simply because I detest the sort of people who
go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
- H. L. Mencken

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything.
I am strongly in favor of common sense,
common honesty, and common decency.
This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
- H. L. Mencken

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
- H. L. Mencken

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty
is a kind of slander on the poor.
- H. L. Mencken

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their
marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
- H. L. Mencken

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear,
simple, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one,
as yet, is suspicious.
- H. L. Mencken

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating
the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
- H. L. Mencken

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

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