Quote

The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.

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
Fulfillment
Essence
Culture
Self
Unshakable
Autonomous
Egotism

More quotes by 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
A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don't forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
H. L. Mencken
Image
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
H. L. Mencken
Image
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The first kiss is stolen by the man the last is begged by the woman.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
H. L. Mencken