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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.

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
Grows
Transient
Politics
Unimportant
Less
Esteem
Character
Particularly
Ideas
Lack
Men
Older
Mere
Grow

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The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.
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I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
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Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
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Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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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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No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
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[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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