H.L. Mencken: Trending quotes

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H.L. Mencken: 562 quotes58 likes

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

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Source: A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.”

H.L. Mencken

1910s
Source: A Little Book in C Major (1916)

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.”

H.L. Mencken

“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.”

H.L. Mencken

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

H.L. Mencken

1
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Source: Minority Report

“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

The portion after the second semicolon is widely paraphrased or misquoted. Two examples are "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" and "There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
1910s
Source: "The Divine Afflatus" in New York Evening Mail (16 November 1917); later published in Prejudices: Second Series (1920) and A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

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

H.L. Mencken

&quot;A Few Pages of Notes,&quot; http://books.google.com/books?id=hXVHAAAAYAAJ&amp;q=%22Democracy+is+the+theory+that+the+common+people+know+what+they+want+and+deserve+to+get+it+good+and+hard%22&amp;pg=PA435#v=onepage The Smart Set (January 1915); later published in A Little Book in C major http://books.google.com/books?id=EAJbAAAAMAAJ&amp;q=%22Democracy+is+the+theory+that+the+common+people+know+what+they+want+and+deserve+to+get+it+good+and+hard%22&amp;pg=PA19#v=onepage (1916), and A Mencken Crestomathy (1949) <br class="br">1910s <br class="br">Source: A Little Book in C Major

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

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 14 "Types of Men" - 3 : The Believer
Source: Prejudices: Third Series

“We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Source: A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. 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

36
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”

H.L. Mencken

323
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Source: Minority Report

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“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…The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.”

H.L. Mencken

222
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Source: Minority Report