H. L. Mencken Quotes
-
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
-
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
-
Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.
-
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
-
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
-
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
-
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
-
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
-
The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.
-
As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
-
Time stays, we go.
-
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
-
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
-
Remorse - Regret that one waited so long to do it.
-
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
-
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.
-
Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.
-
Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
-
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
-
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
-
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
-
Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it; for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
-
The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.
-
If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.