Words matter. These are the best H. L. Mencken Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
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.
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.
Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.
Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.
Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.
Time stays, we go.
Alimony – the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
