H. L. Mencken Quotes About Common Sense

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  It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Honesty, Hate

• School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, School, Boys

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.308, Vintage

• The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.

  H. L. Mencken

  Editors, Common Sense, Giving

• I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

  H. L. Mencken

  Sports, Hate, Common Sense

  Quoted in Fred Metcalfe The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations (1986).

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Sports, Hate, People

• The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Thinking, Long

• 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, and 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, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Sports, Horse

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