Quote

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

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
Dream
Wit
Womanly
Form
Creature
Soaring
Give
Objectives
Lacks
Women
Creatures
Manly
Giving
Necessary
Soar
Men
Dreams
Wholly
Secret
Cynical
Woman
Objective

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
H. L. Mencken
Image
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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
Image
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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
The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
H. L. Mencken