Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by H. L. Mencken (American Journalist, Literary Critic)

Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was an American journalist, editor, literary critic, and historian of language. He became celebrated as an iconoclastic critic of American society and frequently condemned its Puritanism and hypocrisy.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Mencken became editor of the Baltimore Herald, and then joined the Sunpapers in 1906. He worked with the Smart Set 1908–23. With the drama critic George Jean Nathan, Mencken founded the American Mercury in 1924, which Mencken edited until 1933.

Mencken became a significant influence on the American literary scene of the 1920s and supported many writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. Mencken’s primary work is The American Language (1919, revised 1921, 1923, 1936; supplementary volumes, 1945, 1948,) wherein he opposed the dominance of European culture in America. This momentous attempt to organize the vigor and versatility of colloquial American usage made Mencken the leading authority on the language of his country.

Mencken’s reviews of American social and cultural norms and miscellaneous essays filled six volumes appropriately titled Prejudices (1919–27.) His autobiographical trilogy, Happy Days (1940,) Newspaper Days (1941,) and Heathen Days (1943,) is devoted to his experiences in journalism.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by H. L. Mencken

Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Occupation

The best years are the forties; after 50 a man begins to deteriorate, but in his forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Aging

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.
—H. L. Mencken

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth—that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Assumptions

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Age, Aging, Wisdom

God must love the rich or he wouldn’t divide so much among so few of them.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Wealth

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Laughter

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Democracy, Government

Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Money

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Democracy

Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Time

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.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Romance, Love

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Love

The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Religion

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Family

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Music

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Love

A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Religion

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

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 thinkin.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Religion

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Religion

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Certainty

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
—H. L. Mencken

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

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Government

Alimony—the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Divorce

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

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Men

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Morality, Morals

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than be ignorant.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Reason, Thought, Truth

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