Quotes from H.L. Mencken

If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.

No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek.

I dislike persons who change their basic ideas, and I dislike them when they change them for good reasons quite as much as when they change them for bad ones. A convert to a good idea is simply a man who confesses that he was formerly an ass—and is probably one still. When such a man favors me with a certificate that my eloquence has shaken him I feel about him precisely as I'd feel if he told me that he had started (or stopped) beating his wife on my recommendation.

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

I have seen something of the horrors of war, and much too much of the worse horrors of peace.

We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking all their gaudy visions and hallucinations seriously.

A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators.

If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers.

Morality and honor are not to be confused. The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

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

My belief is that happiness is necessarily transient. The natural state of a reflective man is one of depression. The world is a botch. Women can make men perfectly happy, but they seldom know how to do it. They make too much effort: they overlook the powerful effect of simple amiability. Women are also the cause of the worst kind of unhappiness.

Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or at a man.

In Mencken's view, "religion belongs to a very early stage of human development, and... its rapid decay in the world since the Reformation is evidence of genuine progress" ("The Ascent of Man").

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.

Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.

I am, indeed, against all proselyters, whether they be on my side or on some other side. What moves nine-tenths of them, I believe, is simply the certainty of the result that I have just mentioned. Their lofty pretensions are all tosh. The thing they yearn for is the satisfaction of making someone unhappy: that yearning is almost as universal among them as thirst is in dry Congressmen.

Publish and be damned.

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity— he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.

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.

If it were advertised that a troupe of men of easy virtue were to appear half-clothed upon a public stage, exposing their chests, thighs, arms and calves, the only women who would go to the entertainment would be a few delayed adolescents, a psychopathic old maid or two, and a guard of indignant members of the parish Ladies Aid.

What lay at the bottom of their savagery, of course, was their idiotic belief in Calvinism—beyond question the most brutal and barbaric theology ever subscribed to by mortal man, whether in or out of the African bush.