Quotes by Mencken, H. L.

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

Mencken, H. L. on politics   

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it."

Mencken, H. L. on power   

"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."

Mencken, H. L. on prejudice   

"What men value in this world is not rights but privileges."

Mencken, H. L. on privilege
3 fans of this quote   

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Mencken, H. L. on problems   

"The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties."

Mencken, H. L. on public   

"The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man -- that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense -- has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman."

Mencken, H. L. on puritans   

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

Mencken, H. L. on puritans
3 fans of this quote   

"Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work."

Mencken, H. L. on quality   

"After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations."

Mencken, H. L. on quotations   

"Remorse is regret that one waited so long to do it."

Mencken, H. L. on remorse
5 fans of this quote   

"Most people want security in this world, not liberty."

Mencken, H. L. on safety   

"School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not."

Mencken, H. L. on school   

"Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."

Mencken, H. L. on self-respect   

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."

Mencken, H. L. on solutions   

"Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks it is seldom necessary to assume."

Mencken, H. L. on speakers and speaking
3 fans of this quote   

"How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh."

Mencken, H. L. on suffering
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"It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."

Mencken, H. L. on belief
3 fans of this quote   

"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 and chemistry."

Mencken, H. L. on birth control   

"The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading."

Mencken, H. L. on books - reading   

"There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read."

Mencken, H. L. on books - reading
3 fans of this quote   

"There are people who read too much: 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."

Mencken, H. L. on books - reading   

"It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull."

Mencken, H. L. on certainty
3 fans of this quote   

"Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."

Mencken, H. L. on taxes and taxation   

"The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is and always must be essentially and next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?"

Mencken, H. L. on teacher   

"Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse."

Mencken, H. L. on temptation
10 fans of this quote   

"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."

Mencken, H. L. on theology   

"Time stays, we go."

Mencken, H. L. on time   

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"If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish."

Mencken, H. L. on trust
4 fans of this quote   

"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."

Mencken, H. L. on truth
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Mencken, H. L. on truth   

"Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good."

Mencken, H. L. on voting   

"War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands."

Mencken, H. L. on war   

"No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight."

Mencken, H. L. on wisdom   

"I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk."

Mencken, H. L. on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs."

Mencken, H. L. on action
3 fans of this quote   

"Adultery is the application of democracy to love."

Mencken, H. L. on adultery
6 fans of this quote   

"Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas."

Mencken, H. L. on choice
3 fans of this quote   

"Archbishop -- A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ."

Mencken, H. L. on churches   

"A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there."

Mencken, H. L. on churches
4 fans of this quote