Quote

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

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
Imagine
Getting
Genuinely
Even
Cynical
Much
Save
Mind
Intelligent
Good
Habit
College
Boys

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
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
Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.
H. L. Mencken
Image
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The worst government is the most moral.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.
H. L. Mencken
Image
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
H. L. Mencken