Quote

The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

H. L. Mencken

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Way
Write
Heads
Always
Running
Assumption
People
Able
Folly
Ideas
Cases
Many
Mistake
Assumed
Writing
Read
Plain
Even
Understand
Appetite
Made
Speak
Runs

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
H. L. Mencken
Image
What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.
H. L. Mencken
Image
They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No man ever quite believes in any other man.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
H. L. Mencken