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
Educated
Average
Believe
Genuinely
Things
Suspicious
People
Teaches
Citizen
Believes
Extent

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
H. L. Mencken
Image
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
H. L. Mencken
Image
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
H. L. Mencken
Image
...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
H. L. Mencken
Image
All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
H. L. Mencken
Image
[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken