H. L. Mencken quotes - page 6

Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation. (H. L. Mencken)
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepare to see them misunderstood. View quote
H. L. Mencken
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. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution? View quote
H. L. Mencken
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free. (H. L. Mencken)
Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual. View quote
H. L. Mencken
What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story. View quote
H. L. Mencken
School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious. View quote
H. L. Mencken
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses. (H. L. Mencken)
Here is tragedy-and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites? View quote
H. L. Mencken
The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey. View quote
H. L. Mencken
I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it. View quote
H. L. Mencken