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.
No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto , he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there.
By H. L. Mencken
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
By H. L. Mencken
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
By H. L. Mencken
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
By H. L. Mencken
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
By H. L. Mencken
Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
By H. L. Mencken
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebums and smaller adrenal glands.
By H. L. Mencken
Unquestionably there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
By H. L. Mencken
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
By H. L. Mencken
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
By H. L. Mencken
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
By H. L. Mencken
There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.
By H. L. Mencken
There comes a time when a man must spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.
By H. L. Mencken
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
By H. L. Mencken
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
By H. L. Mencken
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
By H. L. Mencken
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
By H. L. Mencken
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
By H. L. Mencken
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
By H. L. Mencken