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H. L. Mencken - From the Aging category:
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Aging category:
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Artists category:
The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Authority category:
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Belief category:
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Books category:
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Boredom category:
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Business category:
The businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Character category:
Nothing can come out of the artist that is not in the man. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Competence category:
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Criticism category:
Criticism is prejudice made plausible. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Destiny category:
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Drunkenness category:
I know some people who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Editing category:
The true function of art is to edit nature and so to make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-pencilling the bad spelling of God. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Fear category:
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Freedom category:
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Gender category:
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Gender category:
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Gender category:
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Greatness category:
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Happiness category:
The only really happy folk are married women and single men. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Idealism category:
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Insecurity category:
Most people want security in this world, not liberty. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Knowledge category:
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Life category:
Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Love category:
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Masters category:
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Mistakes category:
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. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Money category:
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Morality category:
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Morality category:
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Originality category:
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Patriotism category:
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Performance category:
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Philosophy category:
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. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Politics category:
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. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Politics category:
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Problems category:
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Prosperity category:
Wealth: any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Quotations category:
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Religion category:
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the not-worth-knowing. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Satisfaction category:
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Taste category:
Nobody ever lost a buck underestimating the taste of the American public. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Teaching category:
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. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Theory category:
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Time category:
Time stays, we go. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Truth category:
Legend: a lie that has attained the dignity of age. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Understanding category:
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Words category:
The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Work category:
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Writing category:
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it. (H. L. Mencken)
H. L. Mencken - From the Writing category:
There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton. (H. L. Mencken)
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