Progress Quotes by H. L. Mencken

12 Progress quotes by H. L. Mencken

All Progress quotes H. L. Mencken’s page

H. L. Mencken’s 12 remarks cut through idealism with his trademark cynicism. If you enjoy a skeptical take on how society moves ahead, these brief lines deliver it.

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

H. L. Mencken

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

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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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 essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be,…

H. L. Mencken

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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…

H. L. Mencken

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Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress…

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

H. L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken

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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

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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

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

H. L. Mencken

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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

H. L. Mencken

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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

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

H. L. Mencken

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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

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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

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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

H. L. Mencken

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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 their own…

H. L. Mencken

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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

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

H. L. Mencken

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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

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