H. L. Mencken

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

— H. L. Mencken

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

— H. L. Mencken

On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.

— H. L. Mencken

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

— H. L. Mencken

Alimony--the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

— H. L. Mencken

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.

— H. L. Mencken

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.

— H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

— H. L. Mencken

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

— H. L. Mencken

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

— H. L. Mencken

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

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

— H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

— H. L. Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

— H. L. Mencken

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

— H. L. Mencken

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

— H. L. Mencken

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

— H. L. Mencken

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

— H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

— H. L. Mencken

Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

— H. L. Mencken

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

— H. L. Mencken

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

— H. L. Mencken

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

— H. L. Mencken

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

— H. L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

— H. L. Mencken

No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.

— H. L. Mencken

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

— H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

— H. L. Mencken

A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.

— H. L. Mencken

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

The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

— H. L. Mencken

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

— H. L. Mencken

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

— H. L. Mencken

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

— H. L. Mencken

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

— H. L. Mencken

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

— H. L. Mencken

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

— H. L. Mencken

There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.

— H. L. Mencken

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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

— H. L. Mencken

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

— H. L. Mencken

A judge is a law student who grades his own papers.

— H. L. Mencken

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

— H. L. Mencken

Legend : a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

— H. L. Mencken

The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.

— H. L. Mencken

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

— H. L. Mencken

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.

— H. L. Mencken

Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

— H. L. Mencken

Life is a dead-end street.

— H. L. Mencken

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

— H. L. Mencken

Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.

— H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

— H. L. Mencken

To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia.

— H. L. Mencken

If I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.

— H. L. Mencken

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

— H. L. Mencken

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.

— H. L. Mencken

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later, for another thing, they die earlier.

— H. L. Mencken

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

— H. L. Mencken

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

— H. L. Mencken

The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

— H. L. Mencken

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

— H. L. Mencken

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

— H. L. Mencken

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

— H. L. Mencken

A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.

— H. L. Mencken

Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

— H. L. Mencken

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

— H. L. Mencken

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

— H. L. Mencken

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

— H. L. Mencken

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

— H. L. Mencken

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

— H. L. Mencken

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

— H. L. Mencken

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

— H. L. Mencken