Humans Quotes by H. L. Mencken

47 Humans quotes by H. L. Mencken

A man who shares ideas must expect them to be misunderstood, a theme that runs through many of the quotes. They also celebrate human liberty as essential, and they note that life often feels like a comedy, even when tragedy appears.

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Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.

H. L. Mencken

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I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.

H. L. Mencken

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I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty.

H. L. Mencken

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Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

H. L. Mencken

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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.

H. L. Mencken

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[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.

H. L. Mencken

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I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.

H. L. Mencken

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The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads.

H. L. Mencken

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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought..

H. L. Mencken

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All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men…

H. L. Mencken

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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and…

H. L. Mencken

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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and…

H. L. Mencken

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On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the…

H. L. Mencken

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What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more…

H. L. Mencken

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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.

H. L. Mencken

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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions,…

H. L. Mencken

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By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to…

H. L. Mencken

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The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally,…

H. L. Mencken

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It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age…

H. L. Mencken

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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the…

H. L. Mencken

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Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority…

H. L. Mencken

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Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and…

H. L. Mencken

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I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity,…

H. L. Mencken

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What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely…

H. L. Mencken

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I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed…

H. L. Mencken

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The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with…

H. L. Mencken

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It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more…

H. L. Mencken

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School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.

H. L. Mencken

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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.

H. L. Mencken

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The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a…

H. L. Mencken

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What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

H. L. Mencken

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Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

H. L. Mencken

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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

H. L. Mencken

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Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his…

H. L. Mencken

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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the…

H. L. Mencken

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Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely…

H. L. Mencken

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The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead…

H. L. Mencken

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Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic…

H. L. Mencken

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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of…

H. L. Mencken

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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a…

H. L. Mencken

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Other authors on Humans

More by H. L. Mencken

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

H. L. Mencken

A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.

H. L. Mencken

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.…

H. L. Mencken

So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free…

H. L. Mencken

Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead.

H. L. Mencken

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

H. L. Mencken

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble…

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

The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must…

H. L. Mencken

There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend…

H. L. Mencken

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

H. L. Mencken

Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own…

H. L. Mencken

To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue…

H. L. Mencken

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

H. L. Mencken

For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not…

H. L. Mencken