Top 936 Quotes & Sayings by H. L. Mencken - Page 3

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

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

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.

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.

Time stays, we go.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

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.

It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.

When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.

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.

The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money.

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.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.

There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?

The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.