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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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
Happy
Puritanism
Religion
Puritan
Fear
Haunting
Someone
Agnostic
May
Cynical
Spirituality
God
Somewhere
Misanthropy
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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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.
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Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
H. L. Mencken
When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
H. L. Mencken
