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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor

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
Actors
Horns
Political
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Manner
Doctor
Mien
Doctors
Ham
Politician
Tin
Actor
Horn
Politics
Rural

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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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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.
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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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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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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.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
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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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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
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Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
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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.
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The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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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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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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