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A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
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
Formula
Formulas
Tries
Almost
Artist
Whooping
Trying
Incompetence
Always
Conceal
Competence
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
H. L. Mencken
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. Mencken
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
H. L. Mencken
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
H. L. Mencken
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken
Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.
H. L. Mencken
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
Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
H. L. Mencken
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
H. L. Mencken
Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
H. L. Mencken
Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H. L. Mencken
A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
H. L. Mencken
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
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
Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken
Elections are futures markets in stolen property.
H. L. Mencken
Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
H. L. Mencken
Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
H. L. Mencken
