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The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

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
Rich
Beethoven
Year
Genuine
Making
Artists
Artist
Produce
Film
Room
Today
Rooms
Passable
Years
Movies
Craftsmen
Imagine
Craftsman

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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
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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 two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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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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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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Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.
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I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
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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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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
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