H. L. Mencken Quotes - Page 7

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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.

There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic legend.

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

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

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

No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

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

No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.

An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's children devoured by wolves.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason

I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.

A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.

Whenever "A" attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon "B," "A" is most likely a scoundrel.

What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?

Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

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

When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

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

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing.

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

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

Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian Businessman.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

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

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

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

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.

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