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H. L. Mencken Quotes (1880-1956)
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About H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis Mencken (12 September 1880 – 29 January 1956), known as H. L. Mencken, was a twentieth-century journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore" and the "American Nietzsche". He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.
Best H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful H. L. Mencken quotes.
“Historian — An unsuccessful novelist.”
“Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”
“Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.”
“The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.”
“Judge — A law student who marks his own examination-papers.”
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
“Truth — Something somehow discreditable to someone.”
“Self-respect — The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”
“Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.”
“Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths.”
“Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.”
“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
H. L. Mencken Quotes by Topic
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H. L. Mencken on God 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on God →H. L. Mencken on Democracy 3 quotes
“Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat.”
H. L. Mencken on Religion 3 quotes
“The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride.”
H. L. Mencken on Fiction 3 quotes
“Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction—perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.”
H. L. Mencken on Evil 2 quotes
“EVIL. That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.”
H. L. Mencken on Government 2 quotes
“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
H. L. Mencken on New Deal 2 quotes
“The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.”
H. L. Mencken on Fanaticism 2 quotes
“The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”
H. L. Mencken on Christianity 2 quotes
“All the branches of Christianity suffer by the fact that they seem to be unable to take in the greatest contribution of the modern world to ethical theory, to wit, the concept of a moral obligation to be intelligent.”
H. L. Mencken on American literature 2 quotes
“Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction—perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.”
H. L. Mencken on Love
“Adultery is the application of democracy to love.”
What H. L. Mencken Said About Others
Discover personal opinions H. L. Mencken shared regarding contemporaries.
H. L. Mencken on Thomas Henry Huxley 3 quotes
“Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century — perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time.”
H. L. Mencken on Friedrich Nietzsche 3 quotes
“There are critics who see in all this proof that Nietzsche showed signs of insanity from early manhood, but as a matter of fact it was his abnormally accurate vision and not a vision gone awry, that made him stand so aloof from his fellows. In the vast majority of those about him he saw the coarse metal of sham and pretense beneath the showy gilding of learning. ... It was inevitable that he should perceive the difference between his own fanatical striving for the truth and the easy dependence upon precedent and formula which lay beneath their booming bombast.”
H. L. Mencken on William Jennings Bryan 2 quotes
“Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. … Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
H. L. Mencken on Benito Mussolini 2 quotes
“You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist.”
H. L. Mencken on Women
H. L. Mencken on Immanuel Kant
“Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.”
H. L. Mencken on Alfred North Whitehead
“In "Religion in the Making," by A. N. Whitehead... the approach is philosophical, and there are many interesting and valuable observations. But Dr. Whitehead occasionally indulges himself, like all metaphysicians, in what has a suspicious resemblance to nonsense.”
H. L. Mencken on Joel Chandler Harris
“Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank.”
H. L. Mencken on Adolf Hitler
“You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist.”
H. L. Mencken on Joseph Stalin
“You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist.”
H. L. Mencken on Ku Klux Klan
“They were common folk, and their commonness radiated from them like heat from a stove….The wheelbarrow handle, it was plain, was more familiar to the men in that long line than the golf-stick, and the washtub had engaged the women far oftener than the lipstick. But what of it? The klan is not a club for snobs, it is a device for organizing inferiorities into a mystical superiority.”
H. L. Mencken on H. G. Wells
“I have no hestitation whatever in saying that Wells, as he is, entertains me far more agreeably than Dickens. I know very well that the author of David Copperfield was a greater artist than the author of Mr. Polly, just as I know that the Archbishop of Canterbury is a more virtuous man than my good friend, Fred the Bartender, ; but all the same, I prefer Wells and Fred to Dickens and the Archbishop.”
Quotes About H. L. Mencken
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about H. L. Mencken from others.
Carl Hart on H. L. Mencken
“Few would balk at using Viagra or Cialis to enhance sexual performance, but many more find it objectionable to use drugs such as amphetamines to improve the sexual experience. I don't entirely know why this is the case, but my guess is that it has something to do with the misguided puritanical values that are so pervasive in our education and that disproportionately regulate our behaviors. I think H. L. Mencken put it best when he defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."”
Christopher Hitchens on H. L. Mencken
“How did one of America's seemingly great rationalists and modernists come to regard Roosevelt as more worthy of condemnation than Hitler? The answer, on the evidence of this and other studies, is that Mencken was a German nationalist, an insecure small-town petit bourgeois, a childless hypochondriac with what seems on the evidence of these pages to have been a room-temperature libido, an antihumanist as much as an atheist, a man prone to the hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted in others and not as easy with the modern world and its many temptations and diversions as he liked it to be supposed.”
Aldous Huxley on H. L. Mencken
“We should welcome his appearance among us here, for we have sore need of critics who hate humbug.”
Richard Mitchell on H. L. Mencken
“After sober and judicious consideration, and weighing one thing against another in the interests of reasonable compromise, H. L. Mencken concluded that a startling and dramatic improvement in American education required only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools. His uncharacteristically moderate proposal was not adopted.”
Ayn Rand on H. L. Mencken
“I hope you will understand my hesitation in writing to one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life.”
Burton Rascoe on H. L. Mencken
“When H. L. Mencken unpacks his idiomatic brasses, tunes up his verbal strings, and gets in readiness his phrasal wood winds to orchestrate a fugue in damnation or in praise of man, god or book, his all too meagre audience cancels all other engagements to be on hand at the initial presentation. The result, that audience knows, will be an experience of pure enjoyment. His musicianship is unfailing. His program is unsatisfactory only in its impermanence. Though the theme he proposes is invariably Mencken — Mencken apropos of this or that — he gives it infinite and intricate variations.”
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to H. L. Mencken that are questionable.
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to H. L. Mencken
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
About H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis Mencken (12 September 1880 – 29 January 1956), known as H. L. Mencken, was a twentieth-century journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore" and the "American Nietzsche". He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.