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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.

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
Minorities
Belongs
Intellectual
Race
Minority
Heritage

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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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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.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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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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There are two kinds of music German music and bad music.
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One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.
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I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
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All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
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The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
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No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
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Why do men go to zoos?
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The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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