H. L. Mencken Quotes

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H. L. Mencken

Profession : Writer

Birth : September 12, 1880

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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

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

H. L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

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

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

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

H. L. Mencken

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

H. L. Mencken

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

H. L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

H. L. Mencken

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

H. L. Mencken

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

H. L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken

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

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

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