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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

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
Indignant
Pretends
Objection
Doings
Objections
Gossip
Tells

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Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
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The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so.
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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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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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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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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
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