Quote

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

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
Satisfaction
Writing
English
Worse
Physical
Discharging
Forget
Psychic
Business
Unpleasant
Makes
Psychics
Ideas

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
H. L. Mencken
Image
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
H. L. Mencken