H.L. Mencken Quotes (281 quotes, page 5)

“Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Law

“Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Time

“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”

H.L. Mencken

As quoted in LIFE magazine, Vol. 21, No. 6, (5 August 1946), p. 48 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3UwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&client=safari&pg=PA48#v=onepage&q&f=false
1940s–present

“Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.”

H.L. Mencken book The American Language

The American Language (1919)

World

“Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Sister , Wealth

“A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Way

“The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.”

H.L. Mencken

October 24, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

War , World , Support

“The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man."… The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and his sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln… He had every quality that morons esteem in their heros. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics.”

H.L. Mencken

April 13, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

War , People , Imagination , History

“The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 1

“There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”

H.L. Mencken

71
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Men , People , Books , World

“The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Peace , Housing

“It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.”

H.L. Mencken book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908/1913)
1900s

Books , Age , Faith

“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation.”

H.L. Mencken

68
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Hope , Idea , Failure

“When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.”

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun (12 June 1922)
1920s

Justice , Forgetting

“[Roosevelt] was always… finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense, and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparalleled professor.”

H.L. Mencken

April 15, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

Stupidity , Intelligence , Sense , Appearance

“To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband, even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty.”

H.L. Mencken book Treatise on the Gods

Treatise on the Gods (1930; 2nd Edition 1946)
1930s

Life , Disease , Penalty , Sex

“Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic, or military? … it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers. … I have maintained for years, sometimes perhaps with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing?”

H.L. Mencken

On "teachers of English" in "The Schoolmarm's Goal" in The Lower Depths (1925)
1920s

Education , Beauty , Home , Thinking

“The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.”

H.L. Mencken

397
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Falseness

“This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.”

H.L. Mencken

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

War , World

“In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

World

“All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1910s, Prejudices, First Series (1919), Ch. 13

Success , Help

“How does so much [false news] get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows -- because nothing is easier than to fool them -- because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands.”

H.L. Mencken

Prejudices: A Selection, p. 220
1920s

Stupidity , Fools , Intelligence , Thinking

“The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Passion

“Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them.”

H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

Democracy

“It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”

H.L. Mencken

Prejudices, Second Series (1920) Ch. 1
1920s

“I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor — Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!”

H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken : Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work (1994) , p. 190; this work was written in 1941-1942 but sealed until 1991.
1940s–present

Wolf

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

H.L. Mencken

A. J. Liebling, in "Do you belong in journalism?", The New Yorker (14 May 1960); sometimes paraphrased : Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
Misattributed

Freedom

“Here is tragedy—and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.”

H.L. Mencken

"More Tips for Novelists" in the Chicago Tribune (2 May 1926)
1920s

Men , Democracy , Sense , Country

“Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?”

H.L. Mencken

Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)
1920s

Housing

“The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956), p. 217-218

Dependency

“When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”

H.L. Mencken

Newspaper Days: 1899-1906 (1941)
1940s–present

“Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.”

H.L. Mencken

A Book of Burlesques (1916)
1910s

God

“My guess is that well over eighty per cent of the human race goes through life without ever having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before, and by thousands.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. The normal human society is very little troubled by them. Whenever a new one appears the average man displays signs of dismay and resentment. The only way he can take in such a new idea is by translating it crudely into terms of more familiar ideas. That translation is one of the chief functions of politicians, not to mention journalists. They devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters. This debasement is intellectually reprehensible, but probably necessary to carry on the business of the world.”

H.L. Mencken

13
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Life , World , Way , Idea

“I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.”

H.L. Mencken

13
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Truth

“I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a [government] jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital — or his chief heir, in case he has perished — goes before a grand jury and makes a complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.”

H.L. Mencken

"The Malevolent Jobholder," The American Mercury (June 1924), p. 156
1920s

Question

“[Paul Patterson and I] soon got on the subject of the war, and I said flatly that I thought the Sun's course was not only ignorant and absurd, but also not a little disingenuous. It had gone over to the English in an abject and ignominious fashion, against all reason and all the obvious facts. Worse, it had yielded supinely to the most outrageous fiats of the Roosevelt censorship, and had even exceeded them. This shook Patterson somewhat, for he likes to think of himself as a news editor, and he insisted that in handling the war news the Sun had done good work.”

H.L. Mencken

March 17, 1944
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

War , Fashion , Thinking , Sun

“Truth — Something somehow discreditable to someone.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Truth

“When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.”

H.L. Mencken

Reported in various works including Eugene C. Gerhart, Quote It Completely!: World Reference Guide to More Than 5,500 Memorable Quotes from Law and Literature (1998), p. 113, which cites the quote to MENCKEN, HL, A New Dictionary of Quotations, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, p. 134. However, the authorship of the quote does not lie with any work original to Mencken, and was previously reported as an anonymous quote.
Misattributed

Men , Business , Thinking , Cooking

“What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

H.L. Mencken

Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)
1920s

Democracy , Effort , Falseness

“Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.”

H.L. Mencken

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

Democracy , Strong

“It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.”

H.L. Mencken book Notes on Democracy

Notes on Democracy (1926), Part II, p. 99
1920s