H. L. Mencken quotes - page 15

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. (H. L. Mencken)

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

H. L. Mencken

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

H. L. Mencken

The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

H. L. Mencken

There are two kinds of books those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

H. L. Mencken

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

H. L. Mencken

The theater. . . is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

H. L. Mencken

The true function of art is to edit nature and so to make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-pencilling the bad spelling of God.

H. L. Mencken

The more a man dreams, the less he believes.

H. L. Mencken

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

H. L. Mencken

'Hamlet' has been played by 5,000 actors -- no wonder he's crazy. (H. L. Mencken)

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

H. L. Mencken

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

H. L. Mencken

Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.

H. L. Mencken

I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.

H. L. Mencken

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

H. L. Mencken

Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life just after he met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.

H. L. Mencken

There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.

H. L. Mencken

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

No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.

H. L. Mencken

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. (H. L. Mencken)

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

H. L. Mencken

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

H. L. Mencken

A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man.

H. L. Mencken

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

H. L. Mencken

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