113 Quotes By H. L. Mencken


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

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

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
H. L. Mencken on men

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 on men

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
H. L. Mencken on men

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

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

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
H. L. Mencken on men

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
H. L. Mencken on men

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

To die for an idea it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
H. L. Mencken on men

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
H. L. Mencken on money

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

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

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

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

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 on politics

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 on politics

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
H. L. Mencken on relationship

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 on religion