H.L. Mencken: Quotes about men

H.L. Mencken was American journalist and writer. Explore interesting quotes on men.
H.L. Mencken: 562 quotes58 likes

“Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, [Christianity] is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms: all men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon—of such are the celestial elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a million Darwins and Harnacks, will ever empty that great consolation of its allure. The most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion.”

H.L. Mencken

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

“Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“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)

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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

“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&amp;q=%22Bachelors+know+more+about+women+than+married+men+If+they+didn&#x27;t+they&#x27;d+be+married+too%22&amp;pg=PA61#v=onepage (1916) ; later published in A Mencken Crestomathy (1949) <br class="br">1910s

“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

&quot;The Incomparable Buzzsaw&quot;, The Smart Set, May 1919 http://books.google.com/books?id=ySscAAAAIAAJ&amp;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&amp;pg=PA54#v=onepage; later published in Prejudices: Second Series, Ch. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=0-A4AQAAMAAJ&amp;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&amp;pg=PA236#v=onepage (1920) <br class="br">1910s

“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)

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am — a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions — can be so happy as he can be in the United States.”

H.L. Mencken

On Being An American (1922)
1920s

“The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.”

H.L. Mencken

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

“By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil...”

H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury (February 1926)
1920s

“The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”

H.L. Mencken

394
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.... Certainly it would be difficult to imagine any committee of relatively young men, of thirty or thirty-five, showing the unbroken childishness, ignorance and lack of humor of the Supreme Court of the United States. The average age of the learned justices must be well beyond sixty, and all of them are supposed to be of finished and mellowed sagacity. Yet their knowledge of the most ordinary principles of justice often turns out to be extremely meager, and when they spread themselves grandly upon a great case their reasoning powers are usually found to be precisely equal to those of a respectable Pullman conductor.”

H.L. Mencken

"Advice to Young Men" in Prejudices: Third Series (1922).
1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922)