Quote

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.

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
Would
Year
Denmark
Upon
Kingdom
Evil
Kingdoms
Running
Useless
Money
Spent
Many
York
Years
Single
Things
Week
Suffice

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
H. L. Mencken
Image
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
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
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
H. L. Mencken
Image
High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
H. L. Mencken