Quote

He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.

H. L. Mencken

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Coolidge
Nero
Slept
Politics
Whether
President
Night
Political

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is only doubt that creates.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
H. L. Mencken