1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken Quotes
page 4

Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention.

As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was a detractor of religion, populism and representative democracy, which he believed to be a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress, skeptical of economic theories and critical of osteopathic and chiropractic medicine.

Mencken opposed American entry into World War I and World War II. His diary indicates that he was a racist and anti-semite, and privately used coarse language and slurs to describe various ethnic and racial groups . Mencken also at times seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism, though never in its American form. "War is a good thing," he once wrote, "because it is honest, it admits the central fact of human nature… A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid."

Mencken's longtime home in the Union Square neighborhood of West Baltimore was turned into a city museum, the H. L. Mencken House. His papers were distributed among various city and university libraries, with the largest collection held in the Mencken Room at the central branch of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.

✵ 12. September 1880 – 29. January 1956
H.L. Mencken photo
H.L. Mencken: 281   quotes 57   likes

H.L. Mencken Quotes

“If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.”

H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury (March 1936) - referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1930s

Housing

“What is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism.”

H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

Men , Truth

“Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

Idea , Courage

“I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom... [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.”

H.L. Mencken

As quoted in Letters of H. L. Mencken (1961) edited by Guy J. Forgue, p. xiii
1940s–present

Men , Thinking , Freedom

“The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.”

H.L. Mencken

Chicago Tribune (23 May 1926)
1920s

Truth

“The American is marked, in fact, by precisely the habits of mind and act that one would look for in a man insatiably ambitious and yet incurably fearful, to wit, the habits, on the one hand, of unpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggardism, of incessant pushing, and, on the other hand, of conformity, caution and subservience. He is forever talking of his rights as if he stood ready to defend them with his last drop of blood, and forever yielding them up at the first demand.”

H.L. Mencken

The American Credo: A Contribution toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920)
1920s

Fear

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."”

H.L. Mencken

418
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Men

“The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

God , Failure

“Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.”

H.L. Mencken

Homo Neanderthalensis Baltimore Sun (June 29th, 1925), The Impossible Mencken
1920s

Men , Truth , Time

“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

H.L. Mencken

Sententiæ
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Love

“My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.”

H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

Business

“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.”

H.L. Mencken

"Coda" from Smart Set (December 1920)
1920s

Religion , Flying

“Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 4

“I don't have prejudice, I hate everyone equally.”

H.L. Mencken

Attributed in The Mammoth Book of Jokes (2006) edited by Geoff Tibbals; no earlier citation yet located.
Disputed

Hate

“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.”

H.L. Mencken

On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1920-1936), p. 279
1920s

“Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.”

H.L. Mencken

A Book of Burlesques (1916)
1910s

Death

“At the bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world, and hence hatred of him. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans.”

H.L. Mencken

A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 76
1910s

World , Democracy , Time , Envy

“If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth … it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.”

H.L. Mencken

"The American: His New Puritanism," http://books.google.com/books?id=tn9HAAAAYAAJ&q=%22If+there+is+one+mental+vice+indeed+which+sets+off+the+American+people+from+all+other+folks+who+walk+the+earth%22+%22it+is+that+of%22+%22that+every+human+act+must+be+either+right+or+wrong+and+that+ninety-nine+percent+of+them+are+wrong%22&pg=RA1-PA87#v=onepage The Smart Set (February 1914)
1910s

People

“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”

H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury (May 1933), p. 136
1930s

Drawing

“An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it.”

H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

God , Imagination , Learning

“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3

Justice

“Jury — A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Men , Health , Fools , Business

“Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Jealousy

“It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so.”

H.L. Mencken

A Book of Burlesques (1916)
1910s

Age , Suffering

“The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

H.L. Mencken

Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

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

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Fools

“In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Death , Feeling , Hell , Heart

“School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.”

H.L. Mencken book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), pg. 217
1900s

Men , Stupidity , School , Teachers

“God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.”

H.L. Mencken

35
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

God

“Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God - that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.”

H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

God , Faith , Democracy , Nature

“The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 15 "The Dismal Science"

Truth

“It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences. It is moral to change convictions overnight. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough.”

H.L. Mencken

On elected politicians
1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

Soul , Change , Falseness

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

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Source: Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=TqEFAQAAIAAJ&q=%22when+women+kiss+it+always+reminds+one+of+prize+fighters+shaking+hands%22&pg=PA619#v=onepage

Women , Kiss

“Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't, they'd be married, too.”

H.L. Mencken

A Little Book in C major http://books.google.com/books?id=EAJbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Bachelors+know+more+about+women+than+married+men+If+they+didn't+they'd+be+married+too%22&pg=PA61#v=onepage (1916) ; later published in A Mencken Crestomathy (1949)
1910s

Women , Men

“A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative.”

H.L. Mencken book The American Language

Source: The American Language (1919), Ch. 5

Imagination

“To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 2

Way , Search , Joy , Perfection

“If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.”

H.L. Mencken

Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Democracy

“…I have given my whole life to newspapers. I am convinced that they have abandoned their functions, and in an abject and ignominious manner, in the present war. Nine-tenths of them, and even more than nine-tenths, print the official blather without any attempt to scrutinize it… It is a disgraceful spectacle, but I do not believe that anything can be done about it. Roosevelt has taken the press into camp as certainly has he has taken the Supreme Court. It has ceased altogether to be independent and has become docilely official.”

H.L. Mencken

June 10, 1944
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

Life , War

“The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.”

H.L. Mencken

213
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Nature , Help

“Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.”

H.L. Mencken

412
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Science

“No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”

H.L. Mencken

33
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Personality

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

H.L. Mencken

Des MacHale, Wit, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City (KS), 2003, ISBN 978-0-7407-3330-7, page 197 https://books.google.ca/books?id=Dhlgd_Af1C4C&pg=PA197
Misattributed

Wisdom , Democracy

“Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Hell , Dead

“The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.”

H.L. Mencken

"The Incomparable Buzzsaw", The Smart Set, May 1919 http://books.google.com/books?id=ySscAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+allurement+that+they+hold+out+to+men+is+precisely+the+allurement+that+Cape+Hatteras+holds+out+to+sailors+they+are+enormously+dangerous+and+hence+enormously+fascinating%22&pg=PA54#v=onepage; later published in Prejudices: Second Series, Ch. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=0-A4AQAAMAAJ&q=%22The+allurement+that+they+hold+out+to+men+is+precisely+the+allurement+that+Cape+Hatteras+holds+out+to+sailors+they+are+enormously+dangerous+and+hence+enormously+fascinating%22&pg=PA236#v=onepage (1920)
1910s

Women , Men

“Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.”

H.L. Mencken

298
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Men , God , Way , Universe

“I was wise to quit writing for the Sun back in January, 1941, for it was obvious by then that Roosevelt would horn into the war soon or late, and I knew by bitter experience in the last war that I'd be throttled at once. Since then I have thought out many likely articles, but not one of them has been printable. In these days, indeed, my very vocabulary is prohibited. I couldn't so much as mention Roosevelt or Churchill or any of the other frauds without having to face a savage official onslaught, with all blows directed below the belt. The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.”

H.L. Mencken

April 1, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

War , Fraud , Sun

“There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3

“Though the theology of Christianity had thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of Christianity continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact, that they simply must be saved from the wreck—that the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. In this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

Men , World , Fear , Way