Top 936 Quotes & Sayings by H. L. Mencken - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer H. L. Mencken.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
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.
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
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.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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.
Every man is his own hell.
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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.
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.
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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.
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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 chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
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