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
Individual
Government
Live
Deserves
Existing
Individuals
Deserve
Nation
Nations

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
Nature abhors a moron.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
H. L. Mencken
Image
No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
H. L. Mencken