Quote

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.

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
Age
Decent
Mastering
Common
Illness
Industrious
Makes
Trade
Sustain
Keep
Labor
Absurdity
Country
Necessary
Assurance
Men
Ready
Idle
Practice
Civilized
Laboriously
Call
Stands
Weal

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
H. L. Mencken
Image
To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox
H. L. Mencken
Image
To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse
H. L. Mencken
Image
He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
H. L. Mencken
Image
My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken