H. L. Mencken Quotes

A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators.

If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers.

My belief is that happiness is necessarily transient. The natural state of a reflective man is one of depression. The world is a botch. Women can make men perfectly happy, but they seldom know how to do it. They make too much effort: they overlook the powerful effect of simple amiability. Women are also the cause of the worst kind of unhappiness.

"Morality and honor are not to be confused. "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.

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

"I think there is a limit beyond which free speech can't go….a limit that is very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy… I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I have the right to say and to believe anything I please, but I don't have the right to press it on anybody else. For example, take for instance the Catholic Church, which I am on good terms with, personally, but which I have no belief in whatsoever. I have a right to print my dissent from its doctrines, to utter them. I have exercised that right for many years. But I have no right to go on the cathedral steps on Sunday morning, when the Catholics are coming out from High Mass, and make a speech denouncing them. I don't think there is any such right. Nobody has got the right to be a nuisance to his neighbors, or to hurt his neighbor's feelings wantonly. If they come to him and say "What do you think of this Mass that we have just finished?", I think that he has the right to answer. But he has no right to press his opinions on them. Of course you'll notice the peculiar thing about the United States, where there is very little free speech. Free speech is a very limited right, in this country, as I have learned to my bitter experience, more than once. Yet, it is the country where the right to press opinions on reluctant hearers is carried to a development that is unheard of on earth. The whole country's full of propagandists who are bothering everybody, all the time."

In the duel of sex, woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

The Fathers of the Republic, I believe, were far cleverer fellows than they are commonly represented to be, even in the schoolbooks. If it was not divine inspiration that moved them, then they must have drunk better liquor than is now obtainable on earth. For when they made religion a free-for-all, they prepared the way for making it ridiculous; and when they opened the doors of office to the mob, they disposed forever of the delusion that government is a solemn and noble thing, by wisdom out of altruism.

Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or at a man.

Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.

In Mencken’s view, “religion belongs to a very early stage of human development, and... its rapid decay in the world since the Reformation is evidence of genuine progress” (“The Ascent of Man”).

A man's satisfaction with his salary depends on whether he makes more than his wife's sister's husband.

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.

My argument for them is not altruistic in the least, but purely selfish. I should dislike to see them harassed by the law for two plain and sound reasons. One is that their continued existence soothes my vanity (and hence promotes my happiness) by proving to me that there are even worse fools in the world than I am. The other is that, if they were jailed to-morrow for believing in Christian Science, I should probably be jailed the next day for refusing to believe in something still sillier. Once the law begins to horn into such matters, I am against the law, no matter how virtuous its ostensible intent. No liberty is worth a hoot which doesn’t allow the citizen to be foolish once in a while, and to kick up once in a while, and to hurt himself once in a while.