H. L. Mencken Quotes
H. L. Mencken Quotes. Below is a collection of famous H. L. Mencken quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by H. L. Mencken. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
By H. L. Mencken
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
By H. L. Mencken
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
By H. L. Mencken
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
By H. L. Mencken
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. Wisdom
By H. L. Mencken
Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't, they would be married too.
By H. L. Mencken
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.
By H. L. Mencken
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
By H. L. Mencken
Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks it is seldom necessary to assume.
By H. L. Mencken
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
By H. L. Mencken
The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
By H. L. Mencken
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos. He will set them above their betters.
By H. L. Mencken
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. Religion
By H. L. Mencken
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. Religion
By H. L. Mencken
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
By H. L. Mencken
There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
By H. L. Mencken
There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
By H. L. Mencken
Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
By H. L. Mencken
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.
By H. L. Mencken
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. Politics
By H. L. Mencken
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. Politics
By H. L. Mencken
The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
By H. L. Mencken
A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.
By H. L. Mencken
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands. Peace
By H. L. Mencken