H. L. Mencken Quotes
Twentieth-century journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore" and the "American Nietzsche". He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.
(1880 - 1956)
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
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A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
[Cynicism]
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A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
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A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
[Funny]
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A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
[Marriage]
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.
[Religion]
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A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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