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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.

H. L. Mencken

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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
Political
Campaign
Best
Campaigns
Better
Thrown
Ever
National
Mass
Couple
Hangings
Heard
Baptism
Politics
Circus

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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.
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If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
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The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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