H.L. Mencken Quotes

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

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

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

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

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

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.

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

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

The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

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

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 and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

H.L. Mencken Quotes part 2

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.

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

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

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

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

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 kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. 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. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others.

There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

A woman’s whole life is a history of the affections.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

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

A sex symbol is a heavy roll of fat in a tight sweater.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

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.

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

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

To sum it all up, I think that love is ignorance with a capital ‘I.’

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

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

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.