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He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Historian
Journalist
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Literary Critic
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Social Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
H. L. Mencken
One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
H. L. Mencken
History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
H. L. Mencken
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
H. L. Mencken
Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
H. L. Mencken
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. Mencken
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
H. L. Mencken
Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
H. L. Mencken
Osteopath--One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory isto be found in the heads of those who believe it.
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 book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
H. L. Mencken
The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
H. L. Mencken
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H. L. Mencken
The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
H. L. Mencken
The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance he offers absolution.
H. L. Mencken
The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
H. L. Mencken
The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
H. L. Mencken
Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
H. L. Mencken
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
H. L. Mencken
