Quote

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

H. L. Mencken

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Body
Work
Movable
Irresistible
Temptation
Force

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
H. L. Mencken
Image
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
H. L. Mencken
Image
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
H. L. Mencken
Image
[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
Image
It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
H. L. Mencken