Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
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
Political
Like
Burglar
Burglars
Ethical
Politician
Honest
Looking
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. Mencken
Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
H. L. Mencken
High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
H. L. Mencken
The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken
Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
H. L. Mencken
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
H. L. Mencken
The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
H. L. Mencken
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.
H. L. Mencken
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
H. L. Mencken
Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
H. L. Mencken
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
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
A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
H. L. Mencken
The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
H. L. Mencken
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. Mencken
