H. L. Mencken Quotes

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

“Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”

“The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.”

“Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.”

“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.”

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

“In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.”

“The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.”

“I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.”

“I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.”

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

“Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.”

“Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.”

“Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world”

“Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”

“American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.”

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.”

“The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.”

“There is no record in the history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself.”

“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.”

“What reason is there for believing that a high death rate, in itself, is undesirable? To my knowledge none whatever. The plain fact is that, if it be suitably selective, it is extremely salubrious. Suppose it could be so arranged that it ran to 100% a year among politicians, executive secretaries, drive chairmen, and the homicidally insane? What rational man would object?”

“All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.”

“Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.”

“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?”