Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
H. L. Mencken
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Keep
Great
Men
Commandments
Gentleman
Keeping
Ten
Difficulty
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H. L. Mencken
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H. L. Mencken
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
H. L. Mencken
The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.
H. L. Mencken
Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
H. L. Mencken
The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
H. L. Mencken
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
H. L. Mencken
A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
H. L. Mencken
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
H. L. Mencken
At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
H. L. Mencken
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
Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah
H. L. Mencken
Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
H. L. Mencken
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
H. L. Mencken
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
H. L. Mencken
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
H. L. Mencken
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness
H. L. Mencken
The first kiss is stolen by the man the last is begged by the woman.
H. L. Mencken
People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
H. L. Mencken
