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There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.

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
People
Read
Much

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

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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
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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
H. L. Mencken
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
H. L. Mencken
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The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
H. L. Mencken
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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
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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.
H. L. Mencken
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
H. L. Mencken
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.
H. L. Mencken
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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
H. L. Mencken
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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
H. L. Mencken
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Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
H. L. Mencken
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Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H. L. Mencken
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
H. L. Mencken
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
H. L. Mencken
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
H. L. Mencken
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Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
H. L. Mencken
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
H. L. Mencken
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My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
H. L. Mencken
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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
H. L. Mencken