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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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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
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As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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