Way Quotes by H. L. Mencken

27 Way quotes by H. L. Mencken

If you appreciate a tongue‑in‑cheek critique, Mencken’s 27 quips about the Way deliver his signature sarcasm and keen insight. He pulls apart conventions with a scalpel of humor, giving you a fresh, critical lens on how we move through life.

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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.

H. L. Mencken

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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.

H. L. Mencken

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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.

H. L. Mencken

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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.

H. L. Mencken

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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the…

H. L. Mencken

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There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out.

H. L. Mencken

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The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.

H. L. Mencken

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The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob

H. L. Mencken

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The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not…

H. L. Mencken

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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way…

H. L. Mencken

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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so…

H. L. Mencken

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If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and…

H. L. Mencken

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The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from…

H. L. Mencken

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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way…

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…

H. L. Mencken

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Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a…

H. L. Mencken

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It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not…

H. L. Mencken

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Don't tell me what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or…

H. L. Mencken

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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even,…

H. L. Mencken

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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of…

H. L. Mencken

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All of the great patriots now engaged in edging and squirming their way toward the Presidency of the Republic run true to…

H. L. Mencken

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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a…

H. L. Mencken

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All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor…

H. L. Mencken

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I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled...They contained precisely the same rubber,…

H. L. Mencken

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The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible…

H. L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken

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No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help…

H. L. Mencken

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More by H. L. Mencken

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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