H.L. Mencken quote: "Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands."

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what...
H.L. MENCKEN

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect...
H.L. MENCKEN

If this is so, why should any man bother about moral rules and regulations? Why should any man confo...
H.L. MENCKEN

There is something poignantly pathetic in the picture of this valiant fighter—this arrogant ja-sag...
H.L. MENCKEN

It is hard to tell if a man is telling the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his plac...
H.L. MENCKEN

In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of co...
H.L. MENCKEN

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this worl...
H.L. MENCKEN

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul...
H.L. MENCKEN

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man wh...
H.L. MENCKEN

As I grow older I am unpleasantly impressed by the fact that giving each human being but one life is...
H.L. MENCKEN

ONE OF the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that re...
H.L. MENCKEN

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what ...
H.L. MENCKEN

Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end ...
H.L. MENCKEN

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, ...
H.L. MENCKEN

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

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party ...
H.L. MENCKEN

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he...
H.L. MENCKEN

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H.L. MENCKEN

Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
H.L. MENCKEN

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian i...
H.L. MENCKEN

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true i...
H.L. MENCKEN

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it make...
H.L. MENCKEN

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the...
H.L. MENCKEN

People constantly speak of "the government" doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it....
H.L. MENCKEN

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. Bu...
H.L. MENCKEN

All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing form...
H.L. MENCKEN

Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always to...
H.L. MENCKEN

I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom m...
H.L. MENCKEN

The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and t...
H.L. MENCKEN

All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.
H.L. MENCKEN

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party ...
H.L. MENCKEN

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H.L. MENCKEN

Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wh...
H.L. MENCKEN

Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H.L. MENCKEN

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory t...
H.L. MENCKEN

We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
H.L. MENCKEN

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.
H.L. MENCKEN

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adr...
H.L. MENCKEN

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more li...
H.L. MENCKEN

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-...
H.L. MENCKEN

No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to susta...
H.L. MENCKEN

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to th...
H.L. MENCKEN

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every cit...
H.L. MENCKEN

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable ac...
H.L. MENCKEN

A judge is a law student who marks their own examination papers.
H.L. MENCKEN

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

A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certain...
H.L. MENCKEN

All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral valu...
H.L. MENCKEN

It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that even the dullest man, in these bri...
H.L. MENCKEN

Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
H.L. MENCKEN

Nature abhors a moron.
H.L. MENCKEN

No one in this world, so far as I know- and I have researched the records for years, and employed ag...
H.L. MENCKEN

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery ...
H.L. MENCKEN

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sa...
H.L. MENCKEN

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasse...
H.L. MENCKEN

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice...
H.L. MENCKEN

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Sc...
H.L. MENCKEN

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as somethi...
H.L. MENCKEN

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process i...
H.L. MENCKEN

The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost ...
H.L. MENCKEN

Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
H.L. MENCKEN

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the ...
H.L. MENCKEN

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

It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.
H.L. MENCKEN

The true function of art is to...edit nature and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a so...
H.L. MENCKEN

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
H.L. MENCKEN

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object i...
H.L. MENCKEN

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin sl...
H.L. MENCKEN

When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
H.L. MENCKEN

I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.
H.L. MENCKEN

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

The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young...
H.L. MENCKEN

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed{and hence the clamorous to be le...
H.L. MENCKEN

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H.L. MENCKEN

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led t...
H.L. MENCKEN

It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that te...
H.L. MENCKEN

For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to th...
H.L. MENCKEN

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief...
H.L. MENCKEN

What I'd like to read is a scientific review, by a scientific psychologist--if any exists--of 'A Sci...
H.L. MENCKEN

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christian...
H.L. MENCKEN

Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time wh...
H.L. MENCKEN

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge...
H.L. MENCKEN

One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
H.L. MENCKEN

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some...
H.L. MENCKEN

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more li...
H.L. MENCKEN

The opera…is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H.L. MENCKEN

When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivabl...
H.L. MENCKEN

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every h...
H.L. MENCKEN

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, wit...
H.L. MENCKEN

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and gre...
H.L. MENCKEN

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H.L. MENCKEN

He believed that there was need in the world for a class freed from the handicap of law and morality...
H.L. MENCKEN

When we consider the fact that the spectroscope has enabled us to make a chemical analysis of the su...
H.L. MENCKEN

He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, f...
H.L. MENCKEN

In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But t...
H.L. MENCKEN

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion o...
H.L. MENCKEN

Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures o...
H.L. MENCKEN

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
H.L. MENCKEN

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

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the ...
H.L. MENCKEN

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the es...
H.L. MENCKEN

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though sh...
H.L. MENCKEN

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
H.L. MENCKEN

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
H.L. MENCKEN

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and ha...
H.L. MENCKEN

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agen...
H.L. MENCKEN

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
H.L. MENCKEN

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; ...
H.L. MENCKEN

There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
H.L. MENCKEN

the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.
H.L. MENCKEN

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sak...
H.L. MENCKEN

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be r...
H.L. MENCKEN

Under democracy one party always devotes it's chief energies to prove that the other party is unfit ...
H.L. MENCKEN

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist...
H.L. MENCKEN

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H.L. MENCKEN

There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portug...
H.L. MENCKEN

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless...
H.L. MENCKEN

Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world the...
H.L. MENCKEN

That's the good thing about it. Nothing counts except what's goin' on around you.
H.L. DAVIS

You're kind and patient and honorable, and yes, maybe those aren't flashy, magical, extraordinary tr...
H.L. BURKE

A peaceful feeling: A happy harmony or symphony of all of our character pieces working in powerful u...
H.L. BALCOMB

ART happens every time we live in the spirit of the moment’s greatness" from Cinderella in Focus
H.L. BALCOMB

If religion is understanding God in the collective stories of life, then spirituality is finding God...
H.L. BALCOMB

When a mother elevates her communication, she naturally elevates the outcomes of her child's life si...
H.L. BALCOMB

The smaller the item of gratitude, the purer is the connection to our heart.
H.L. BALCOMB

Vulnerability along with a sense of humility are the purest forms of strength.
H.L. BALCOMB

Her smile makes me feel like a million little stars have just found their home in the gravitational ...
H.L. BALCOMB

We need to be wise consumers of information in an age of artificially created reality, written by pr...
H.L. WEGLEY

As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner ...
HL MENCKEN

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
H. L. MENCKEN

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
H. L. MENCKEN

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. MENCKEN

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
H. L. MENCKEN

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

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
H. L. MENCKEN

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. MENCKEN

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H. L. MENCKEN

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin sl...
H. L. MENCKEN

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. MENCKEN

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

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think becau...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation...
H. L. MENCKEN

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the pr...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

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

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
H. L. MENCKEN

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

Time stays, we go.
H. L. MENCKEN

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

The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom...
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 wi...
H. L. MENCKEN

All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will b...
H. L. MENCKEN

The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surm...
H. L. MENCKEN

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are wo...
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 ...
H. L. MENCKEN

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adr...
H. L. MENCKEN

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had an...
H. L. MENCKEN

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

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

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys...
H. L. MENCKEN

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

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led t...
H. L. MENCKEN

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense that we respect his theory that ...
H. L. MENCKEN

It is a sin to believe in the evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
H. L. MENCKEN

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party...
H. L. MENCKEN

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
H. L. MENCKEN

No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a c...
H. L. MENCKEN

School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of du...
H. L. MENCKEN

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

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all: it is simply to reduce as many in...
H. L. MENCKEN

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. B...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

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

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

Fame: an embalmer trembling with stage fright.
H. L. MENCKEN

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

So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice s...
H. L. MENCKEN

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will...
H. L. MENCKEN

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

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her hea...
H. L. MENCKEN

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regar...
H. L. MENCKEN

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later, for another thing, th...
H. L. MENCKEN

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

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better...
H. L. MENCKEN

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H. L. MENCKEN

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.
H. L. MENCKEN

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act...
H. L. MENCKEN

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

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he...
H. L. MENCKEN

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is t...
H. L. MENCKEN

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in l...
H. L. MENCKEN

H.L. Mencken

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