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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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
Called
Making
Art
Another
Altruists
Men
Devote
Like
Unhappy
Animals
Animal
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.
H. L. Mencken
Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
H. L. Mencken
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
H. L. Mencken
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H. L. Mencken
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H. L. Mencken
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
H. L. Mencken
Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
H. L. Mencken
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
H. L. Mencken
When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
H. L. Mencken
Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
H. L. Mencken
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
H. L. Mencken
Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
H. L. Mencken
The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
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
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
H. L. Mencken
