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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.

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
Time
Grief
Failures
Scheme
Worked
Bank
Taxpayers
Ones
Federal
Solely
Simply
Ruins
Banking
Next
Bill
Schemes
Deposit
Come
Escape
Banks
Pestilence
Enough
Bills
Insurance
Taxpayer
Good
Quickly
Ruin
Deposits

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If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.
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The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
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The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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