H.L. Mencken: Trending quotes (page 10)

H.L. Mencken trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
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“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

H.L. Mencken

Sententiæ
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Love

“My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.”

H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

Business

“To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.”

H.L. Mencken

"Coda" from Smart Set (December 1920)
1920s

Religion , Flying

“Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 4

“I don't have prejudice, I hate everyone equally.”

H.L. Mencken

Attributed in The Mammoth Book of Jokes (2006) edited by Geoff Tibbals; no earlier citation yet located.
Disputed

Hate

“The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.”

H.L. Mencken

On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1920-1936), p. 279
1920s

“Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.”

H.L. Mencken

A Book of Burlesques (1916)
1910s

Death

“At the bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world, and hence hatred of him. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans.”

H.L. Mencken

A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 76
1910s

World , Democracy , Time , Envy

“If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth … it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.”

H.L. Mencken

"The American: His New Puritanism," http://books.google.com/books?id=tn9HAAAAYAAJ&q=%22If+there+is+one+mental+vice+indeed+which+sets+off+the+American+people+from+all+other+folks+who+walk+the+earth%22+%22it+is+that+of%22+%22that+every+human+act+must+be+either+right+or+wrong+and+that+ninety-nine+percent+of+them+are+wrong%22&pg=RA1-PA87#v=onepage The Smart Set (February 1914)
1910s

People

“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”

H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury (May 1933), p. 136
1930s

Drawing

“An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it.”

H.L. Mencken

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

God , Imagination , Learning

“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

H.L. Mencken

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3

Justice

“Jury — A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Men , Health , Fools , Business

“Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Jealousy

“It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so.”

H.L. Mencken

A Book of Burlesques (1916)
1910s

Age , Suffering

“The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

H.L. Mencken

Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Fools

“In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.”

H.L. Mencken

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Death , Feeling , Hell , Heart

“School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.”

H.L. Mencken book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), pg. 217
1900s

Men , Stupidity , School , Teachers

“God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.”

H.L. Mencken

35
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

God