Quote

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

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
Something
Discreditable
Somehow
Democracy
Freedom
Someone
Truth

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H. L. Mencken
Image
We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
H. L. Mencken
Image
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
H. L. Mencken
Image
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
H. L. Mencken