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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
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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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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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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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
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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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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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The Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
H. L. Mencken
