Quotes by H. L. Mencken

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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
--H. L. Mencken

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

I go on working for the same reason a hen goes on laying eggs.
--H. L. Mencken

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
--H. L. Mencken

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

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

For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong.
--H. L. Mencken

College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.
--H. L. Mencken

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
--H. L. Mencken

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

'Tis more blessed to give than receive; for example, wedding presents.
--H. L. Mencken

Evil is that which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
--H. L. Mencken

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist "Jack."
--H. L. Mencken

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

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule and both commonly succeed, and are right.
--H. L. Mencken

The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
--H. L. Mencken

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
--H. L. Mencken

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that begins to bunch them.
--H. L. Mencken

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

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.
--H. L. Mencken

There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.
--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 and chemistry.
--H. L. Mencken

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
--H. L. Mencken

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
--H. L. Mencken