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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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Badly
Machine
Machines
Works
Literature
Beautiful
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
H. L. Mencken
The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
H. L. Mencken
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
H. L. Mencken
What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
H. L. Mencken
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
H. L. Mencken
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.
H. L. Mencken
All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
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
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
H. L. Mencken
On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
H. L. Mencken
Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
H. L. Mencken
The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
H. L. Mencken
One seldom discovers a true believer that is 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
Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
H. L. Mencken
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
H. L. Mencken
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. Mencken
History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
H. L. Mencken
