Quote

A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

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
Needs
Constant
Men
Blood
Like
Small
Incessantly
Dies
Tongues
Suffering
Transactions
Language
Gates
Living
Begins
Else
Tongue

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
H. L. Mencken
Image
One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
H. L. Mencken
Image
When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
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
Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
H. L. Mencken
Image
He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
H. L. Mencken
Image
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
H. L. Mencken
Image
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
H. L. Mencken