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Quotations from

H. L. Mencken

About

Picture of H. L. Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also earned him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose styles.

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H. L. Mencken is sometimes cited as:

Quotes from H. L. Mencken

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

—H. L. Mencken

fear happiness puritanism

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

—H. L. Mencken

belief mankind passion

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

—H. L. Mencken

conscience voice looking observation

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

—H. L. Mencken in Minority Report

humanity power greed idealism

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

—H. L. Mencken

truth belief lying

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. . . . All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.

—H. L. Mencken

progress certainty morality inferiority doubt enforcement

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

—H. L. Mencken

love imagination intelligence

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

—H. L. Mencken

cynicism death flowers coffins

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

—H. L. Mencken

politics imagination worry alarm menace

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.

—H. L. Mencken

politics sin sorrow Republicans

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

—H. L. Mencken

religion respect subjectivity relativism

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

—H. L. Mencken

politics power democracy fitness

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

—H. L. Mencken

boredom animals

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

—H. L. Mencken

perception world money value

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

—H. L. Mencken

Books

H. L. Mencken has the following books quoted on Quodid: