H.L. Mencken Quotes

Information about H.L. Mencken ,

H.L. Mencken ,

H.L. Mencken ,

American journalist, editor, and critic, H.L. Mencken was born in Baltimore in 1888. Mencken wielded tremendous influence regarding southern intellectual life in the 1920s and was a contributor to Smart Set and American Mercury. His crusade against Puritanism and provincialism sent shock waves through the south, as did his indictment on sou…

Date of Birth: September 12, 1880

Date of Death: January 26, 1956

Found 478 quotes by H.L. Mencken.
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"The surest way to get on in politics in America is to play the leading part in a prosecution which attracts public notice"

H.L. Mencken Topics: America

"For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end."

H.L. Mencken Topics: Friends Or Friendship Trust

"The only really happy folk are married women and single men."

H.L. Mencken Topics: American Writer Dating

"In order to teach chemistry or psychology or even history or Greek a man must actually know something, but for the teacher of English nothing seems to be necessary beyond a crude capacity to read and write"

H.L. Mencken Topics: History

"To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason"

H.L. Mencken Topics: Reason

"The lunatic fringe wags the underdog"

H.L. Mencken

"A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it"

H.L. Mencken Topics: Home

"One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up"

H.L. Mencken

"During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year"

H.L. Mencken Topics: Evil

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

H.L. Mencken Topics: Democracy

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

H.L. Mencken Topics: Age And Aging

"If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x X y is less than y"

H.L. Mencken Topics: Population

"Theology-An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing"

H.L. Mencken

"A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them."

H.L. Mencken Topics: American Writer First Love

"Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient"

H.L. Mencken

"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

H.L. Mencken Topics: American Writer Common Sense

"Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse."

H.L. Mencken Topics: Politicians And Politics

"There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it"

H.L. Mencken Topics: Justification

"The cynics are right nine times out of ten."

H.L. Mencken Topics: Cynicism Cynics And Cynicism

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality"

H.L. Mencken Topics: Education

"I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine."

H.L. Mencken Topics: American Writer Cigarette

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