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Men Quotes by H. L. Mencken

230 Men quotes by H. L. Mencken

All Men quotes H. L. Mencken’s page

Mencken argues that only a few men are truly worth knowing, and prejudice often stops us from meeting them. He jokes that love dies hard for men but stays dead for women. He also warns that politics often disguises a simple change of form as a deep change in substance.

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Why do men go to zoos?

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No man ever quite believes in any other man.

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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

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No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.

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The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.

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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.

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No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts.

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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.

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A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.

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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

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All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

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The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true…

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A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.

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The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.

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Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible…

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Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have…

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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions…

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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage?…

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I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and…

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But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious…

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A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so…

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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly…

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Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the…

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The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and…

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The great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts.…

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

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The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it…

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The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's…

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Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions…

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Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known…

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[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks…

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Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful,…

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

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

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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

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Man makes love by braggadocio, and woman makes love by listening.

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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.

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Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead

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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

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More by H. L. Mencken

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

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

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

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

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

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

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

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

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

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

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

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

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

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

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