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Henry Louis Mencken quotes (63) The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Fake After all all he did was string together a lot of old well-known quotations. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Quotations 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. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Court A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Home War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands. Henry Louis Mencken Category: War All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Logic The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Lever Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Puritanism Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Injustice It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Birthday Time is the great legalizer even in the field of morals. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Time The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to when it has been cured of one error is usually simply another error and maybe one worse than the first. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Error Self-repect The secure feeling that no one as yet is suspicious. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Self The fact that a human brain of high amperage otherwise highly efficient may have a hole in it is surely not a secret. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Brain A man is called a good fellow for doing things which if done by a woman would land her in a lunatic asylum. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Man The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Bore It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Evolution Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile and well-regarded at the bank and never late at meals. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Bank The great artists of the world are never Puritans and seldom even ordinarily respectable. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Art Do not overestimate the decency of the human race. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Decency All of the great patriots now engaged in edging and squirming their way toward the Presidency of the Republic run true to form. That is to say they are all extremely wary and all more or less palpable frauds. What they want primarily is the job; the necessary equipment of unescapable issues immutable principles and soaring ideals can wait until it becomes more certain which way the mob will be whooping. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Unsorted Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Bachelors 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. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Epitaphs To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery of happy accident. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Speak School days are the unhappiest in the whole span if human existence. They are full of dull unintelligible tasks new and unpleasant ordinances with brutal violations of common sense and common decency. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Common Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Delusion I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Truth Marriage is a wonderful institution but who would want to live in an institution? Henry Louis Mencken Category: Institutions There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze seeing nothing and hearing nothing. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Alcohol Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Flag A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Cynic The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Age The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider for example two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service but a boundless almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown to uncover the secret to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Inaccuracy Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Democracy The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked and he has not been caught. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Diet Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Conscience It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone that even the dullest man in these bright days knows more than any man of say the Eighteenth Century and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous.... The great masses of men even in this inspired republic are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant they are dishonest they are cowardly they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Progress The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins all of them imaginary. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Politics Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a moveable body. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Temptation Opera in English is in the main about as sensible as baseball in Italian. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Music For centuries theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Explain On one issue at least men and women agree; they both distrust women. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Trust Hanging one scoundrel it appears does not deter the next. Well what of it? The first one at least is disposed of. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Capable Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Vote A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesnt know. Henry Louis Mencken Category: False Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Woe We must repsect the other fellows religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Religion The basic fact about human existence is not that it is A tragedy but that it is a bore. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Life In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me I rejoice that I am not a Republican. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Republican Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Metaphysics There are two times in every mans life when he is thoroughly happy; just after he has met his first love and just after he has parted from his last one. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Happiness The fact is that liberty in any true sense is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior mans mind. And no wonder for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood said Jefferson is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance it means resolution it means the capacity for doing without ... the average man doesnt want to be free. He wants to be safe. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Inferior An idealist is one who on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage concludes that it will also make better soup. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Idea Criticism is prejudice made plausible. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Prejudice Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Illusions The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of ones time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Fight How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe a cockroach in the spaghetti a womans laugh. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Suffer Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Sales We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Knowledge The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Housework Men become civilized not in proportion to their willingness to believe but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Doubt The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Money 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. Henry Louis Mencken Category: Marriage |
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