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H.L. Mencken Quotes | Quotes said by H.L. Mencken

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #1

    A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #2

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

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #3

    A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #4

    A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The marks of that so-called intuition are simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, a habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, a magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #5

    A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #6

    A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #7

    After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #8

    All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #9

    American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #10

    An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #11

    As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #12

    Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #13

    Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #14

    Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #15

    Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—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 Quote #16

    Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #17

    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.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #18

    Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #19

    Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #20

    Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #21

    Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #22

    Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #23

    Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #24

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

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #25

    Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #26

    Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #27

    He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #28

    Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

  • H.L. Mencken Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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