H. L. Mencken Quotes

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.

Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

“Away with your croakings about the futility of life,” he wrote in the summer of 1915. “That it is meaningless I grant you, but surely not futile. So long as there is the joy of a job well-done—whether an epic, a fried egg or a murder—there will be plenty of excuses for remaining alive.”

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Years ago I predicted that these suffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They are now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh at them; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply becomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey.

No man can get anywhere in this world in any really and endurable manner without some recourse to books.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

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

Those who can — do. Those who can't — teach.

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
(writing of public education in the April 1924 The American Mercury)