H. L. Mencken Quotes

Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.

H. L. Mencken

• Experience

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.

  

  Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • Good
  • Attention
  • Advice

• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

  

  H. L. Mencken
  • Man
  • Government
  • Decent

• The mutated Marfan gene creates a defective version of fibrillin, a protein that provides structural support for soft tissues like blood vessels. Marfan victims often die young, in fact, after their aortas grow threadbare and rupture.

  

  Sam Kean
  • Support
  • Die
  • Grow

• I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.

  

  Larry Bird
  • World
  • American
  • Mean

• My dad is afraid of my laugh.

  

  Halston Sage
  • Dad
  • Laugh
  • Afraid

• This quality, I mean Geoffrey was with me, was very easy doing - he loved me very much, I loved him very much, and we understood each other so well that it was a pleasure to make music.

  

  Victoria de los Angeles
  • Music
  • Quality
  • Easy

• A woman caring for her children; a woman striving to excel in the private sector; a woman partnering with her neighbors to make their street safer; a woman running for office to improve her country - they all have something to offer, and the more our societies empower women, the more we receive in return.

  

  Queen Rania of Jordan
  • Women
  • Country
  • Children

• I have won the most national titles as a German, so what should I do after that? Lay back and take it easy? That's not how I am.

  

  Bastian Schweinsteiger
  • German
  • National
  • Titles

• I think Ali was a fan of mine, even though he never said it. A lot of fighters thought I was pretty good. Nobody every really spoke different on that. But a lot of fighters thought I was good so.

  

  Larry Holmes
  • Good
  • Different
  • Think

• I think my first thought on reaching the summit- of course, I was very, very pleased to be there, naturally - but my first thought was one of a little bit of surprise. I was a little bit surprised that here I was, Ed Hillary, on top of Mt. Everest. After all, this is the ambition of most mountaineers.

  

  Edmund Hillary
  • Thought
  • Ambition
  • Surprise

• That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.

  

  Hans Jonas
  • True
  • Nature
  • Death

• One of the main lessons I have learned the last five years as Secretary-General is that the United Nations cannot function properly without the support of the business community and civil society. We need to have tripartite support - the governments, the business communities and the civil society.

  

  Ban Ki-moon
  • Business
  • Society
  • Community

• It's a tough life being a pop star. You know, at the end of the day when you've paid all the bills and put the kids through college and that, you know, there's only enough left for a small island off the South Pacific.

  

  Larry Mullen, Jr. U2
  • Life
  • Kids
  • Small

• My wife watches me like a hawk.

  

  Carl Icahn
  • Me
  • Wife
  • Like

• I'm fine, except, you know, I broke my pelvis. And that's not much fun.

  

  Nancy Reagan
  • Fun
  • You
  • Know

• The fact that I'm very close with my past relationships is something I pride myself on. My mom is still close to her first husband. It's nice to be able to enjoy someone in a different form.

  

  Kate Bosworth
  • Different
  • Past
  • Nice

• The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace.

  

  W. Edwards Deming
  • Fun
  • Management
  • Workplace

• There are some musicians who are talented and see themselves as some kind of natural geniuses or something because of a certain amount of natural ability. But that is often rarely the case over the long term.

  

  Pat Metheny
  • Long
  • Kind
  • Musicians

• I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives.

  

  Kathryn Harrison

• For many activities, people cannot rely solely on themselves in evaluating their ability level because such judgments require inferences from probabilistic indicants of talent about which they may have limited knowledge. Self-appraisals are, therefore, partly based on the opinions of others who presumably possess evaluative competence.

  

  Albert Bandura
  • People
  • May
  • Knowledge

• What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

  

  Peter Gay

• History tells us that a general can move and feed an army as efficiently as he likes, but the real litmus test is the battlefield.

  

  Saul David
  • Army
  • General
  • Battlefield

• The free man is not he who defies the rules ... but he who, recognizing the compulsions inherent in his being, seeks rather to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest each day's experience.

  

  Bernard Iddings Bell
  • Experience
  • Rules
  • Compulsion

• Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.

  

  H. L. Mencken
  • Experience