One of the most influential and quoted American writers of the 20th century. Mencken was a journalist, satirist, and critic whose writings have been widely quoted in popular culture. He was well known for his wit and humor, and his quotes remain some of the most memorable of all time. On this page, you will find a collection of some of his most memorable and thought-provoking quotes. So sit back, relax, and get ready to be inspired by the words of H L Mencken Quotes!
H. L. Mencken Quotes
🟤”A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”
🟤”A Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.”
🟤”After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.”
🟤”Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
🟤”Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
🟤”Even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights: the right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities, provided only that he does not try to inflict them upon others by force; he has the right to argue for them as eloquently as he can. But he has no right to be protected from the criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.”
🟤”Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
🟤”For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
“Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.”
🟤”It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.”
🟤”Justice is what you get when you run out of money.”
🟤”Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.”
🟤”No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
🟤”On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
🟤”People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?”
🟤”The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
🟤”The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.”
🟤”The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
🟤”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.”
🟤”The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”
🟤”The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.”
🟤”The State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.”
🟤”The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
🟤”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.”
🟤”When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Democracy
🟤”A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
🟤”A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”
🟤”A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.”
🟤”A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”
🟤”Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; 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, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.”
🟤”Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.”
🟤”Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.”
🟤”Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”
🟤”Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
🟤”Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”
🟤”The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed.”
🟤”Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.”
🟤”If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
🟤”Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.”
🟤”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.”
🟤”Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”
🟤”The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.”
🟤”The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.”
🟤”The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.”
🟤”The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
🟤”Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
H. L. Mencken Funny Quotes
🟤”A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.”
🟤”A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
🟤”A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.”
🟤”A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.”
🟤”All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”
🟤”A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.”
🟤”Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.”
🟤”Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.”
🟤”Dachshund: A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.”
🟤”Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
🟤”Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.”
🟤”I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.”
🟤”It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”
🟤”Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.”
“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”
🟤”On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.”
🟤”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.”
🟤”Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”
🟤”Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”
🟤”The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.”
🟤”The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.”
🟤”There are two kinds of music; German music and bad music.”
🟤”Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.”
🟤”When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Freedom
🟤”A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
🟤”A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”
🟤”A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”
🟤”Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
🟤”Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.”
🟤”Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
🟤”Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
🟤”For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
🟤”It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly.”
🟤”The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed.”
🟤”I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.”
🟤”In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”
🟤”It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.”
🟤”Most people want security in this world, not liberty.”
🟤”Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”
🟤”The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.”
🟤”The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
🟤”The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
🟤”There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.”
🟤”Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”
🟤”Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
🟤”We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Liberty
🟤”All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.”
🟤”Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
🟤”Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
🟤”Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.”
“I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.”
🟤”It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.”
🟤”It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.”
🟤”Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.”
🟤”Most people want security in this world, not liberty.”
🟤”The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”
🟤”The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back. the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.”
🟤”The average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth… It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty – and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.”
🟤”The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without . . . the average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.”
🟤”The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth… Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty – and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.”
🟤”The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.”
🟤”The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.”
🟤”The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
🟤”The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
🟤”There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.”
🟤”Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
🟤”We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.”
🟤”What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Literature
🟤”A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.”
🟤”A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.”
🟤”A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”
🟤”Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”
🟤”Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.”
🟤”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.”
🟤”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.”
🟤”I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.”
🟤”If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”
🟤”In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.”
🟤”It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.”
🟤”It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.”
🟤”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.”
🟤”A lie that has attained the dignity of age.”
🟤”Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.”
🟤”Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.”
🟤”Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.”
🟤”The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”
🟤”The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.”
🟤”The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.”
🟤”The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane.”
🟤”But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”
🟤”Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.”
🟤”There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.”
🟤”When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.”
🟤”Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Accidents
🟤”Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it; for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog.”
🟤”Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent – slimy, sneaking and abominable.”
🟤”There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”
🟤”To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said – there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Achievement
🟤”American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.”
🟤”The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.”
🟤”The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Achievement
🟤”American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.”
🟤”The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.”
🟤”The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Adultery
🟤”Adultery is the application of democracy to love.”
🟤”One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.”
“The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Adventure
🟤”As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes care of those who have been so fortunate as to come into the world foolish. Expressing skepticism that adventure does not necessarily contribute to scientific knowledge.”
🟤”It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.”
🟤”One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner–in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.”
🟤”The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure. … A Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretention, but there is no need to take it seriously.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Affairs
🟤”A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.”
🟤”A Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.”
🟤”All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.”
🟤”It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.”
🟤”Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.”
🟤”There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson’s day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs.”
🟤”They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Age
🟤”Always remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.”
🟤”For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.”
🟤”It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning , witchcraft and sacerdotalism.”
🟤”The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts–not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.”
🟤”The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.”
🟤”The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.”
🟤”The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
🟤”The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we’d still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we’d be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Agnosticism
🟤”A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.”
🟤”A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn’t remember any time that he wasn’t, has almost no hatred for the religious.”
🟤”All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.”
🟤”Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable…. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.”
🟤”God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, and 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.”
🟤”I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.”
🟤”The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.”
🟤”Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I’ll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Alcohol
🟤”A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.”
🟤”All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.”
🟤”As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far – much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet.”
🟤”I drink exactly as much as I want, and one drink more.”
🟤”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 Quotes About Altruism
🟤”A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.”
🟤”An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor’s children devoured by wolves.”
🟤”The cynics are right nine times out of ten.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes About Animals
🟤”A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.”
🟤”Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself–by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.”
🟤”Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect.”
🟤”Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.”
🟤”One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.”
🟤”The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose – for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.”
🟤”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.”
Verdict
H L Mencken Quotes are timeless, filled with wit and wisdom. His words are still relevant today, and his thoughts and observations remain relevant, even in the modern era. Mencken’s work has had a great influence on the development of modern thought, and his words continue to shape our thoughts and views, even today. We can all take something from his quotes, and be inspired to think more deeply and critically.