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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Atmosphere
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Education
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Making
Culture
Heritage
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
H. L. Mencken
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
H. L. Mencken
The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
H. L. Mencken
Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
H. L. Mencken
Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
H. L. Mencken
There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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.
H. L. Mencken
But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
H. L. Mencken
Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
H. L. Mencken
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
H. L. Mencken
The worshiper is the father of the gods.
H. L. Mencken
Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
H. L. Mencken
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
H. L. Mencken
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
H. L. Mencken
The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
H. L. Mencken
