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Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.

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
Terrible
Shams
Eyes
Devoid
Though
Sharp
Knowledge
Sees
Eye
Lack
May
Intelligence
Certainly
Youth

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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
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The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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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.
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When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
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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.
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
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Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
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