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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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Religion
Puritan
Fear
Haunting
Someone
Agnostic
May
Cynical
Spirituality
God
Somewhere
Misanthropy
Happy
Puritanism
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
H. L. Mencken
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
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Always remember this: If you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.
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The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
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Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon B, A is most likely a scoundrel.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
H. L. Mencken
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
H. L. Mencken
The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
H. L. Mencken
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
H. L. Mencken
The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
H. L. Mencken
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
H. L. Mencken
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 Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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