H. L. Mencken Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old H. L. Mencken quotes, H. L. Mencken sayings, and H. L. Mencken proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.'

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop. H. L. Mencken
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. H. L. Mencken
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself. H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. H. L. Mencken
Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges. H. L. Mencken
There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read. H. L. Mencken
Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn. H. L. Mencken
The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt. H. L. Mencken
Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne. H. L. Mencken
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. H. L. Mencken
The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated. H. L. Mencken
Adultery is the application of democracy to love. H. L. Mencken
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. H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. H. L. Mencken
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient. H. L. Mencken
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice. H. L. Mencken
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. H. L. Mencken
When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything. H. L. Mencken
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest. H. L. Mencken
Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. H. L. Mencken
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men. H. L. Mencken
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. H. L. Mencken
It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man. H. L. Mencken
It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause. H. L. Mencken
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. H. L. Mencken
The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful. H. L. Mencken
There is always an easy solution to every problem neat, plausible, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one. H. L. Mencken
Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands. H. L. Mencken
In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added. H. L. Mencken