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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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
Badly
Machine
Machines
Works
Literature
Beautiful
Men
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
H. L. Mencken
Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
H. L. Mencken
At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
H. L. Mencken
When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.
H. L. Mencken
[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
H. L. Mencken
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. Mencken
I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
H. L. Mencken
When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
H. L. Mencken
In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
H. L. Mencken
I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.
H. L. Mencken
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
H. L. Mencken
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken
Nature abhors a moron.
H. L. Mencken
The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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
Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
H. L. Mencken
Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
H. L. Mencken
Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
H. L. Mencken
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
H. L. Mencken
