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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
Machines
Works
Literature
Beautiful
Men
Badly
Machine
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
H. L. Mencken
It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
H. L. Mencken
If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
H. L. Mencken
The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
H. L. Mencken
School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
H. L. Mencken
A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
H. L. Mencken
The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
H. L. Mencken
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
H. L. Mencken
The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
H. L. Mencken
Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
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 editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
H. L. Mencken
What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
H. L. Mencken
Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
H. L. Mencken
He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
H. L. Mencken
Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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
Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.
H. L. Mencken
