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To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
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
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Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Preposterous
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
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On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.
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At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.
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I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
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All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
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In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
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In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.
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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
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There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.
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