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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
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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
Freedom
Compromise
Humiliations
Order
Near
Dishonorable
Many
Anywhere
Indistinguishable
Make
Politician
Compromises
Men
Office
Professionally
Becomes
Humiliation
Democracy
Submit
High
Professional
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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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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The war on privilege will never end. Its next grat campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.
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Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
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Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
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The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
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People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
H. L. Mencken
The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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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.
H. L. Mencken
