H. L. Mencken Quotes

“What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.”

“It is more blessed to give than receive; for example, wedding presents.”

“What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.”

“The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.”

“Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories”

“Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said is that its cosmetic effect is good.”

“No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.”

“The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.”

“The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.”

“Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.”

“[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.”

“The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.”

“A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.”

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

“At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.”

“Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.”

“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.”

“The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly veryfriendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.”

“I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech - alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organizedsociety.”

“The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money.”

“Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.”

“The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.”

“The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.”

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

“Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?”