H. L. Mencken Quotes

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world.

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself--by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.

Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.

New York: A third-rate Babylon.

Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.

Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.

I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.

My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.

The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

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.

Writing does for me what giving milk does for a cow.

America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.

Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.

Those who can't teach - administrate. Those who can't administrate - go into politics.

It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind

To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.

There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.

Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.

A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.

Probably the worst thing that has happened in America in my time is the decay of confidence in the courts. No one can be sure any more that in a given case they will uphold the plainest mandate of the Constitution. On the contrary, everyone begins to be more or less convinced in advance that they won't. Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it, but precisely because they appear to be against it.

The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.

The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.

One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

Evil is that which one believes of others.

The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull

There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.

Democracy must be a sound scheme at bottom, else it would not survive such cruel strains.

Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.