Quote

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

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
Common
Moron
True
Conspiracy
Every
Central
Desert
Mysterious
Victim
Rights
Belief
Deserts

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every man is his own hell.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is only doubt that creates.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
H. L. Mencken
Image
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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
The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
H. L. Mencken
Image
No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
H. L. Mencken