My vanity is excessive: wherever I sit is the head of the table.
H. L. MENCKEN, Letters of H. L. Mencken
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. MENCKEN, attributed, Balderdash: A Treatise on Ethics
Temptation is woman's weapon and man's excuse.
H. L. MENCKEN, Mencken Chrestomathy
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H. L. MENCKEN, attributed, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness wich which really sound notions make their way in the world. The minute a new one is launched, in whatever fields, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologian, for the only really workable defense, in polemics as in war, is a vigorous offensive. But convention frowns upon that device as indecent, and so theologians continue their assault upon sense without much resistance, and the enlightenment is unpleasantly delayed.
H. L. MENCKEN, Baltimore Evening Sun, December 9, 1929
Self-respect -- The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
H. L. MENCKEN, A Mencken Chrestomathy
I ... hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States.
H. L. MENCKEN, Heathen Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1890-1936
The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
H. L. MENCKEN, Minority Report
Apparently he was convinced that exercise on the wooden horse and flying rings would cure my scholarly stoop, and make a kind of grenadier of me. If so, he was in error, for I remain more or less Bible-backed to this day, and am often mistaken for a Talmudist. 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 in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub.
H. L. MENCKEN, Heathen Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1890-1936
Some people read too much: the bibliobuli ... who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through the most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H. L. MENCKEN, "Minority Report", Notebooks
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
H. L. MENCKEN, A Mencken Chrestomathy
The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.
H. L. MENCKEN, attributed, Insults: A Practical Anthology of Scathing Remarks and Acid Portraits
A man of self-respect is one who still believes that nobody suspects him.
H. L. MENCKEN, attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.
H. L. MENCKEN, A Book of Burlesques
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H. L. MENCKEN, In Defense of Women
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. MENCKEN, A Mencken Chrestomathy
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
H. L. MENCKEN, attributed, Violence and Mediation in Contemporary Culture
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate.
H. L. MENCKEN, "The Scientist", A Mencken Chrestomathy
It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.
H. L. MENCKEN, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Fame: an embalmer trembling with stage fright.
H. L. MENCKEN, A Book of Burlesques
Or send them to Arkansas to butcher the politicians and clergy? It is not only a way to get rid of them, and of the heavy expense of keeping them; it is a way to civlize Arkansas and the South Seas.
