H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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?

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

Time stays, we go.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man. Mencken, H. L.

— H. L. Mencken

The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.

— H. L. Mencken