H.L. Mencken: Most

H.L. Mencken was American journalist and writer. Explore interesting quotes on most.

H.L. Mencken: 562 quotes58 likes

“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.”

A Book of Burlesques (1916)
1910s

“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

“Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.”

298
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.”

H.L. Mencken book The American Language

The American Language (1919)

“There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”

71
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation.”

68
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“[Paul Patterson and I] soon got on the subject of the war, and I said flatly that I thought the Sun's course was not only ignorant and absurd, but also not a little disingenuous. It had gone over to the English in an abject and ignominious fashion, against all reason and all the obvious facts. Worse, it had yielded supinely to the most outrageous fiats of the Roosevelt censorship, and had even exceeded them. This shook Patterson somewhat, for he likes to think of himself as a news editor, and he insisted that in handling the war news the Sun had done good work.”

March 17, 1944
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.... Certainly it would be difficult to imagine any committee of relatively young men, of thirty or thirty-five, showing the unbroken childishness, ignorance and lack of humor of the Supreme Court of the United States. The average age of the learned justices must be well beyond sixty, and all of them are supposed to be of finished and mellowed sagacity. Yet their knowledge of the most ordinary principles of justice often turns out to be extremely meager, and when they spread themselves grandly upon a great case their reasoning powers are usually found to be precisely equal to those of a respectable Pullman conductor.”

"Advice to Young Men" in Prejudices: Third Series (1922).
1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

“My literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in belief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety.”

Letter to George Müller (1923), Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast, Oxford University Press, (2005) pp. 105-106, first published in Autobiographical Notes, 1941
1920s

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

H.L. Mencken book In Defense of Women

In Defense of Women (1918)
1910s