Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Justice
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.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Politics, Politicians
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Churches, Religion
All government, of course, is against liberty.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Liberty
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Happiness
The evidence of the emotions, save in cases where it has strong objective support, is really no evidence at all, for every recognizable emotion has its opposite, and if one points one way then another points the other way. Thus the familiar argument that there is an instinctive desire for immortality, and that this desire proves it to be a fact, becomes puerile when it is recalled that there is also a powerful and widespread fear of annihilation, and that this fear, on the same principle proves that there is nothing beyond the grave. Such childish proofs are typically theological, and they remain theological even when they are adduced by men who like to flatter themselves by believing that they are scientific gents…
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Emotions
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.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Marriage
Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Morals, Morality
The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits
—H. L. Mencken
God must love the rich or he wouldn’t divide so much among so few of them.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Wealth
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: The Universe
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Golf
Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings.
—H. L. Mencken
It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Critics, Criticism
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Prejudice
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.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Manners
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
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Unhappiness
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: War
Time stays, we go.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Time
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
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Government
Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks it is seldom necessary to assume.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Speakers, Speaking
It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Belief
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Law
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
—H. L. Mencken
Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: America
The Liberals have many tails, and chase them all
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Liberalism
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Government, Democracy
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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: Imagination
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
—H. L. Mencken
Topics: The Present, Knowledge
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Carl Bernstein American Journalist
- Walter Lippmann American Journalist
- Christopher Morley American Novelist, Essayist
- Heywood Broun American Journalist
- Dorothy Thompson American Journalist
- B. C. Forbes Scottish-born American Journalist
- Lincoln Steffens American Journalist
- Norman Cousins American Journalist
- James Fallows American Journalist
- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison American Journalist
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