Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon B, A is most likely a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Law
Attempts
Moral
Users
Upon
Likely
War
Whenever
Political
Standards
Government
Drug
Scoundrel
Life
Liberty
Scoundrels
Justice
Impose
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
H. L. Mencken
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
H. L. Mencken
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
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
H. L. Mencken
A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
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
The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
H. L. Mencken
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
H. L. Mencken
For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute.
H. L. Mencken
Nature abhors a moron.
H. L. Mencken
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
H. L. Mencken
I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. Mencken
When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
H. L. Mencken
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
H. L. Mencken
The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
H. L. Mencken
To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
H. L. Mencken
Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
H. L. Mencken
A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
H. L. Mencken
Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
H. L. Mencken
