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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.

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
Teach
Poor
Experience
Followed
Really
Teaches
Men
Seldom
Guide
Guides
Observation

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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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Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
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The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
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Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
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History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
H. L. Mencken
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
H. L. Mencken
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
H. L. Mencken