Quotes by Henry Louis Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken

American journalist and critic

Alive from: 1880-1956

Category: Media

Quotes 46 till 60 of 169.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
  

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  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.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
  Source: A Carnival of Buncombe

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  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.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  Historian - an unsuccessful novelist.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
  

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
  

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  Hope is a pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

• Henry Louis Mencken

  

  - +

   0
  I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.