Famous Quotes by H. L. Mencken (130 Quotations)

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

H. L. Mencken – [Conscience]

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

H. L. Mencken – [Conscience]

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken – [Critics and Criticism]

Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

H. L. Mencken – [Democracy]

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken – [Democracy]

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

H. L. Mencken – [Decency]

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

H. L. Mencken – [Family]

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H. L. Mencken – [Faith]

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken – [Problems]

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.

H. L. Mencken – [Marriage]

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

H. L. Mencken – [Voting]

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.

H. L. Mencken – [God]

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

H. L. Mencken – [Government]

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.

H. L. Mencken – [Humankind]

Historian — an unsuccessful novelist.

H. L. Mencken – [History and Historians]

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

H. L. Mencken – [Honor]

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

H. L. Mencken – [Suffering]

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

H. L. Mencken – [Husbands]

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

H. L. Mencken – [Hygiene]

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

H. L. Mencken – [Liberty]