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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.

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
Environment
Almost
Society
Placed
Artist
Hath
Art
Assume
Country
Assuming
Dignity
Safe

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I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
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In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
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The worshiper is the father of the gods.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.
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Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
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The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
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The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
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