The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it-… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All successful newpapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image