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

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

H. L. Mencken – [Cinema]

The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

H. L. Mencken – [Gossip]

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

H. L. Mencken – [Age and Aging]

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

H. L. Mencken – [Abuse]

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

H. L. Mencken – [Music]

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.

H. L. Mencken – [Juries]

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

H. L. Mencken – [Public]

The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is and always must be essentially and next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?

H. L. Mencken – [Teachers and Teaching]

The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.

H. L. Mencken – [Puritans]

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.

H. L. Mencken – [Lies and Lying]

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.

H. L. Mencken – [Power]

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

H. L. Mencken – [Politicians and Politics]

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

H. L. Mencken – [Theology]

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

H. L. Mencken – [Books and Reading]

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

H. L. Mencken – [Books and Reading]

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

H. L. Mencken – [Philosophers and Philosophy]

There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.

H. L. Mencken – [Idleness]

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

H. L. Mencken – [Morality]

Time stays, we go.

H. L. Mencken – [Time and Time Management]

To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia.

H. L. Mencken – [Love]