Misattributed H L Mencken Quotes

I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian... The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat - which wasn't there. 'That may be,' said the philosopher, 'but a theologian would have found it. ~ Julian Huxley

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

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

Injustice is relativelyl easy to bear; what stings is justice. ~ H.L. Mencken

To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride. ~ H.L. Mencken

Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas ~ 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

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy. ~ 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

The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman. ~ H.L. Mencken

An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person." ~ Henry Louis Mencken ~ H.L. Mencken

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself
by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true. ~ H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. As she looked down at her dead child, Mary Beth realized that the unbearable sense of loss she felt was tempered by gratitude and a kind of relief. There would be no more boyfriends now, no more weekend parties. Ruby would remain pure forever, and for that her mother was deeply grateful. Catholicism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be having a good time ... with your daughter. ~ Anna Quindlen

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

In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides. ~ H.L. Mencken

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none. ~ H.L. Mencken

Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity. ~ H.L. Mencken

Writing does for me what giving milk does for a cow. ~ H.L. Mencken

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace. ~ H.L. Mencken

Ask the average American what is the salient passion in his emotional armamentarium - what is the idea that lies at the bottom of all his other ideas - and it is very probable that, nine times out of ten, he will nominate his hot and unquenchable rage for liberty. He regards himself, indeed, as the chief exponent of liberty in the whole world, and all its other advocates as no more than his followers, half timorous and half envious. To question his ardour is to insult him as grievously as if one questioned the honour of the republic or the chastity of his wife. And yet it must be plain to any dispassionate observer that this ardour, in the course of a century and a half, has lost a large part of its old burning reality and descended to the estate of a mere phosphorescent superstition. ~ H.L. Mencken

All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers. ~ H.L. Mencken

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful. ~ H.L. Mencken

Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals ~ H.L. Mencken

Publish and be damned. ~ H.L. Mencken

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank. ~ H.L. Mencken

Class consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite
the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moron
run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron ... ~ H.L. Mencken

Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose. ~ H.L. Mencken

At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room. ~ H.L. Mencken

No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket's confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought. ~ H.L. Mencken

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

Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives. ~ H.L. Mencken

Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives. ~ H.L. Mencken

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. ~ H.L. Mencken

Here is tragedy and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum. ~ H.L. Mencken

No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night. ~ H.L. Mencken

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers. ~ H.L. Mencken

Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another "Rosenkavailer." ~ H.L. Mencken

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice. ~ H.L. Mencken

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages. ~ H.L. Mencken

Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States
first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln. ~ H.L. Mencken

I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries. ~ H.L. Mencken

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. ~ H.L. Mencken

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. ~ H.L. Mencken

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war ... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage. ~ H.L. Mencken

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle. ~ H.L. Mencken

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. ~ H.L. Mencken

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor. ~ H.L. Mencken