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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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
Leads
Thus
Cities
Probably
American
World
Philadelphia
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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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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There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
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The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
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The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
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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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It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
H. L. Mencken
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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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 people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.
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No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
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