H. L. Mencken Literature Quotations

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation

As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.

Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.