H. L. Mencken Quotes

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.

Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect.

He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.

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.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.

Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.

The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.

Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.

Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus.

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.

The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.

No politician is ever benefited by saving money; it is spending it that makes him.

I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf; it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.

Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.

We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.

The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.

The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.

Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.

The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.

It is only doubt that creates.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.

The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.... A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.

What I got in Sunday school ... was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous.... The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling before a being who, if he really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected.

Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.

Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.