Quote

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

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
Reader
Impassioned
Sort
Edit
Artist
Spelling
Art
Edits
True
Criticize
Nature
Proof
Function
Blue
Embellish

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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
Image
In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
H. L. Mencken
Image
For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
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