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Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
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
Charm
Fiction
Becomes
Work
Every
Something
Absorbing
Autobiography
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
H. L. Mencken
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
H. L. Mencken
Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
H. L. Mencken
The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
H. L. Mencken
Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H. L. Mencken
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H. L. Mencken
The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.
H. L. Mencken
Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
H. L. Mencken
The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.
H. L. Mencken
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
We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
H. L. Mencken
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
H. L. Mencken
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
The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
H. L. Mencken
I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
H. L. Mencken
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
H. L. Mencken
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
H. L. Mencken
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
H. L. Mencken
