H. L. Mencken quotes - page 15

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. (H. L. Mencken)
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them. View quote
H. L. Mencken
There are two kinds of books those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The theater. . . is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated. View quote
H. L. Mencken
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. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The more a man dreams, the less he believes. View quote
H. L. Mencken
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. View quote
H. L. Mencken
'Hamlet' has been played by 5,000 actors -- no wonder he's crazy. (H. L. Mencken)
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy. View quote
H. L. Mencken
I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men. View quote
H. L. Mencken
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life just after he met his first love, and just after he has left his last one. View quote
H. L. Mencken
There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do. View quote
H. L. Mencken
No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer. View quote
H. L. Mencken
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. (H. L. Mencken)
It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. View quote
H. L. Mencken
A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man. View quote
H. L. Mencken
One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable. View quote
H. L. Mencken