110+ H. L. Mencken Quotes On Government, Elections And Death

H. L. Mencken was an American writer, journalist, and literary critic in the early 20th century. He is best known for his satirical reportage on politics, literature, and culture. He was a contributor to The Nation and The American Mercury magazines, and his books include The American Language and Prejudices. Following is our collection on famous quotes by H. L. Mencken on government, elections, death.

Top 10 H. L. Mencken Quotes

1. 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.
2. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
3. Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
4. 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.
5. Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
6. Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
7. Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
8. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
9. Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
10. We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

H. L. Mencken Image Quotes

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas. — H. L. Mencken

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. — H. L. Mencken

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. — H. L. Mencken

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. — H. L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. — H. L. Mencken

Most people want security in this world, not liberty. — H. L. Mencken

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. — H. L. Mencken

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. — H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. — H. L. Mencken

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft. — H. L. Mencken

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. — H. L. Mencken

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment. — H. L. Mencken

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral. — H. L. Mencken

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Short Quotes

• The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
• A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
• As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
• There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
• For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
• To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
• The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
• The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
• The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
• Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Government

People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist? — H. L. Mencken

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. — H. L. Mencken

The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged. — H. L. Mencken

All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man. — H. L. Mencken

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself. — H. L. Mencken

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. — H. L. Mencken

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all. — H. L. Mencken

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. — H. L. Mencken

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

Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Elections

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. — H. L. Mencken

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in. — H. L. Mencken

Elections are futures markets in stolen property. — H. L. Mencken

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Death

There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility. — H. L. Mencken

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety. — H. L. Mencken

The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn. — H. L. Mencken

A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general. — H. L. Mencken

When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Love

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. — H. L. Mencken

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology. — H. L. Mencken

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess. — H. L. Mencken

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. — H. L. Mencken

Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop — H. L. Mencken

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth. — H. L. Mencken

Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love. — H. L. Mencken

The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies. — H. L. Mencken

A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses. — H. L. Mencken

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Cynical

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

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another. — H. L. Mencken

Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people. — H. L. Mencken

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell. — H. L. Mencken

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. — H. L. Mencken

The cynics are right nine times out of ten. — H. L. Mencken

It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism. — H. L. Mencken

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all. — H. L. Mencken

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. — H. L. Mencken

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin or when he sees silver he looks for the cloud it lines. A wise happy person does the exact opposite. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Quotes About World

Most people want security in this world, not liberty. — H. L. Mencken

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands. — H. L. Mencken

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

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously. — 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

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. — H. L. Mencken

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges. — H. L. Mencken

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched 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. — H. L. Mencken

Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world. — H. L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Religion

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. — H. L. Mencken

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind. — H. L. Mencken

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. — H. L. Mencken

A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man. — H. L. Mencken

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. — H. L. Mencken

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies. — H. L. Mencken

Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses. — H. L. Mencken

Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage. — H. L. Mencken

Archbishop -- A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ. — H. L. Mencken

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Democracy

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

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. — H. L. Mencken

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker. — H. L. Mencken

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's 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. — H. L. Mencken

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one. — H. L. Mencken

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven. — H. L. Mencken

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. — H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H. L. Mencken

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. — H. L. Mencken

Adultery is the application of democracy to love. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Quotes About People

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

Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people. — H. L. Mencken

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it. — H. L. Mencken

A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one. — H. L. Mencken

All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine. — H. L. Mencken

There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties. — H. L. Mencken

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back. — H. L. Mencken

[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. — H. L. Mencken

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon. — H. L. Mencken

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. — H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Famous Quotes And Sayings

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas. — H. L. Mencken

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. — H. L. Mencken

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. — H. L. Mencken

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office. — H. L. Mencken

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. — H. L. Mencken

Most people want security in this world, not liberty. — H. L. Mencken

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates. — H. L. Mencken

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. — H. L. Mencken

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. — H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. — H. L. Mencken

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft. — H. L. Mencken

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken

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

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner. — H. L. Mencken

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

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. — H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. — H. L. Mencken

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment. — H. L. Mencken

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral. — H. L. Mencken

I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish. — H. L. Mencken

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before. — H. L. Mencken

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. — H. L. Mencken

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous. — H. L. Mencken

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse. — H. L. Mencken

Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead — H. L. Mencken

All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen. — H. L. Mencken

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits — H. L. Mencken

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog. — H. L. Mencken

No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man. — H. L. Mencken

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair. — H. L. Mencken

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner — H. L. Mencken

Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true. — H. L. Mencken

Alimony -- the ransom that the happy pay to the devil. — H. L. Mencken

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. — H. L. Mencken

The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. — H. L. Mencken

Dachshund: A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long. — H. L. Mencken

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh. — 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

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. — H. L. Mencken

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. — H. L. Mencken

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers. — H. L. Mencken

It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron. — H. L. Mencken

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race. — H. L. Mencken

the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe. — H. L. Mencken

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. — H. L. Mencken

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. — H. L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. — H. L. Mencken

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too. — H. L. Mencken

On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women. — H. L. Mencken

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single. — H. L. Mencken

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. — H. L. Mencken

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. — H. L. Mencken

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor. — H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom. — H. L. Mencken

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. — H. L. Mencken

Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal. — H. L. Mencken

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone. — H. L. Mencken

Honor is simply the morality of superior men. — H. L. Mencken

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety. — H. L. Mencken

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking. — H. L. Mencken

The martini: the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet. — H. L. Mencken

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. — H. L. Mencken

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology. — H. L. Mencken

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. — H. L. Mencken

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism. — 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

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier. — H. L. Mencken

There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal. — H. L. Mencken

Life Lessons by H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken taught that life should be lived with a sense of humor and a healthy dose of skepticism. He believed that people should strive to be independent thinkers, free from the influence of popular opinion. He also encouraged people to be true to themselves, to be honest and to take responsibility for their own actions.