Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H. L. Mencken
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
School
Spirituality
Children
Prison
Conscience
Parents
Parent
Religion
Evil
Penance
Family
Sunday
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
H. L. Mencken
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
H. L. Mencken
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H. L. Mencken
Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
H. L. Mencken
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
H. L. Mencken
I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
H. L. Mencken
The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
H. L. Mencken
A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
H. L. Mencken
The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
H. L. Mencken
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
H. L. Mencken
Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
H. L. Mencken
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
H. L. Mencken
There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
H. L. Mencken
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H. L. Mencken
People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
H. L. Mencken
Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
H. L. Mencken
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken
