Quote

To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.

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
Average
Believe
Genuinely
Things
Suspicious
People
Teaches
Citizen
Believes
Extent
Educated

More quotes by 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
Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
H. L. Mencken
Image
To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
H. L. Mencken
Image
My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
H. L. Mencken