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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Freedom
Plausible
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Libertarian
Every
Ashamed
Men
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Liberty
Politics
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
H. L. Mencken
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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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.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
H. L. Mencken
There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]
H. L. Mencken
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
H. L. Mencken
Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. L. Mencken
The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
H. L. Mencken
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
H. L. Mencken
