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.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.
By H. L. Mencken
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.
By H. L. Mencken
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him. Marriage
By H. L. Mencken
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
By H. L. Mencken
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too. Marriage
By H. L. Mencken
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier. Marriage
By H. L. Mencken
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single. Marriage
By H. L. Mencken
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. Life
By H. L. Mencken
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.
By H. L. Mencken
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.
By H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. Government
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
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. Funny
By H. L. Mencken
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...
By H. L. Mencken
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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
By H. L. Mencken
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
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 and chemistry.
By H. L. Mencken