Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H. L. Mencken
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Normal
Anarchy
Humor
Flags
Hoist
Times
Tempted
Throats
Funny
Aggression
Columnists
Black
Throat
Badass
Hands
Temptation
Heresy
Must
Anger
Spit
Every
Begin
Flag
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
H. L. Mencken
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
H. L. Mencken
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
H. L. Mencken
Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
H. L. Mencken
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
H. L. Mencken
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken
I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
H. L. Mencken
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
H. L. Mencken
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
H. L. Mencken
If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
H. L. Mencken
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
H. L. Mencken
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
H. L. Mencken
Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
H. L. Mencken
High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
H. L. Mencken
If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
H. L. Mencken
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
H. L. Mencken
He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
H. L. Mencken
All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
H. L. Mencken
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H. L. Mencken
