H. L. Mencken Quotes
H. L. Mencken Quotes. Below is a collection of famous H. L. Mencken quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by H. L. Mencken. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
By H. L. Mencken
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
By H. L. Mencken
Congress consists of one third, more or less, scoundrels; two thirds, more or less, idiots; and three thirds, more or less, poltroons.
By H. L. Mencken
College football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students - there would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks.
By H. L. Mencken
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
By H. L. Mencken
Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
By H. L. Mencken
Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
By H. L. Mencken
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
By H. L. Mencken
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
By H. L. Mencken
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
By 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.
By H. L. Mencken
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
By H. L. Mencken
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
By H. L. Mencken
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
By H. L. Mencken
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
By H. L. Mencken
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
By H. L. Mencken
...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
By H. L. Mencken
School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
By H. L. Mencken