H. L. Mencken the Writer, biography, facts and quotes

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

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage"

"Honor is simply the morality of superior men"

"Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian"

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

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses"

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under"

"Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas"

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable"

"Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy"

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

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence"

"In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft"

"Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another"

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

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

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking"

"It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause"

"Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ"

"The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt"

"Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages"

"I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs"

"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing"

"The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression"

"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"

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule"

"The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil"

"The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence"

"The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral"

"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince"

"Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true"

"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"

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

"Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon"

"Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong"

"Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier"

"Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"

"Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago"

"Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on"

"Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly"

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods"

"The cynics are right nine times out of ten"

"Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself"

"No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight"

"Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed"

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry"

"I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine"

"The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line"

"Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body"

"Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse"

Born as	Henry Louis Mencken
Occup.	Writer
From	USA
Born	September 12, 1880 Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Died	January 29, 1956 Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Cause	Stroke
Aged	75 years

H. L. Mencken Biography

124 Famous quotes by H. L. Mencken