Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The best years are the forties after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
H. L. Mencken
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Maximum
Forty
Fifty
Begins
Best
Years
Deteriorate
Men
Forties
Villainy
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. Mencken
The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
H. L. Mencken
Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
H. L. Mencken
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
Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
H. L. Mencken
War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
H. L. Mencken
Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
H. L. Mencken
Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.
H. L. Mencken
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
H. L. Mencken
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. Mencken
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
Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
H. L. Mencken
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
H. L. Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
H. L. Mencken
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
H. L. Mencken
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
The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
H. L. Mencken
The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
H. L. Mencken
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H. L. Mencken