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H. L. Mencken Quotes

1880–1956 United States

Henry Louis Mencken (12 September 1880 – 29 January 1956), known as H. L.

United States
Activists
Agnostics
Anti-communists
Autobiographers

Also known as: H L Mencken, H.L. Mencken, Henry Louis Mencken, Hl mencken, Mencken, Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis)

Random H. L. Mencken quote

223 quotes

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married.

A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

The liberty to have and hold property is not one they recognize. They believe only in the liberty to envy, hate and loot the man who has it.

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!

Notes on Democracy (1926)

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia — to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Prejudices, First Series (1919)

There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.

The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school-teachers.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't, they'd be married, too.

A Little Book in C Major (1916)

No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system.

Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

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 organized society.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

It is, of course, quite true that there is a region in which science and religion do not conflict. That is the region of the unknowable.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn't got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.

A Little Book in C Major (1916)

The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell.

A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

My engagement to AP is off. Her husband made pedantic objections to it.

Mencken: A Life by Fred Hobson (1994)

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: H. L. Mencken (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.