H.L. Mencken Quotes

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

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

Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.

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

A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.

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

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.

A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.

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

A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

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.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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

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

Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

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

A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.

We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.

The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.

There are two impossibilities in life: "just one drink" and "an honest politician."

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

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

Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.

There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out.

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.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

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

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

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.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

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.

Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.