The quotations of

H. L. Mencken

American journalist and writer

1880–1956

63 quotes, most often on Government, Politics and Clever Jabs. Part of the Writers collection.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
- Love
- War & Peace
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
- Truth & Lies
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
- Christianity
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
“Advice to Young Men” in Prejudices: Third Series (1922).
- Age
- Wisdom
Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them.
- War & Peace
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth⁠—that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3 “Footnote on Criticism”, pp. 85-104
- Truth & Lies
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
- Freedom
- Laws
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 14 “Types of Men”—3: The Believer
- Faith
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
- Philosophy
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
- Morality
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule⁠—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)
- Democracy
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
- Money
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
- America
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
- Government
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
- Government

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