Quote

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

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
Front
Humor
Justice
Messianic
Passion
Withers
Sense
Patriotic
Truth
Delusion
Always
Presence
Like
Fronts

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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
Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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
The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
H. L. Mencken
Image
What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
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
Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
H. L. Mencken