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It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.

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
Time
Tragedy
Indeed
Adults
Youth
Respect
Tragedies
Quite
Mainly
Young
Capital
Real
Thrown

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Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
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There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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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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Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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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.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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Nature abhors a moron.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
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A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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