Quote

I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.

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
Nation
Nations
Individual
Government
Live
Deserves
Existing
Individuals
Deserve

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
H. L. Mencken
Image
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
H. L. Mencken
Image
History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.
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
Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn
H. L. Mencken
Image
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
H. L. Mencken
Image
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
H. L. Mencken