H. L. Mencken Quotes

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.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

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

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.

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.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

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.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

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.

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

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

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

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

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

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

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

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

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

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

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

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.

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

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

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.

I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.

Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead

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.

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

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