H.L. Mencken Quotes: 20

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

• Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

  Prejudices: First Series

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

  A Book of Burlesques

• If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

• Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

  A Mencken Chrestomathy

• In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.

• Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

  A Little Book in C Major

• Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

  Notes on Democracy

• Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

• Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

  Prejudices: Second Series

• We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

  Minority Report

• We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

  A Mencken Chrestomathy

• The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

• 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.

• 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.

• You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

• A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.

• The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

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

• If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.