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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.

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
Prolong
Childhood
Genius
Ability

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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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It is only doubt that creates.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
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Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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