H.L. Mencken Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup. A Book of Burlesques

2. Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. A Mencken Chrestomathy

3. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched 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. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. Notes on Democracy

4. Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. Prejudices: First Series

5. Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong. Prejudices: Second Series

6. Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. Prejudices: Third Series

7. Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

8. In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.

9. It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God. Minority Report

10. It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse. American Mercury

11. No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

12. Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. A Mencken Chrestomathy

13. The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

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

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

16. 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. Minority Report

17. It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse. American Mercury

18. The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

19. The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes. A Mencken Chrestomathy

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