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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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
Sufficient
Worthy
Waiting
Waits
Best
Treason
Men
Reliance
Unlimited
Corruption
Temptation
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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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.
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When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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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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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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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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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
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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.
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Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
H. L. Mencken
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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I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.
H. L. Mencken
Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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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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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
