H. L. Mencken Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von H. L. Mencken:

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

H. L. Mencken

Life is a dead-end street.

H. L. Mencken

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

H. L. Mencken

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

H. L. Mencken

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

H. L. Mencken

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

H. L. Mencken

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

H. L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

H. L. Mencken

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

H. L. Mencken

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

H. L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

H. L. Mencken

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

H. L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

H. L. Mencken

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

H. L. Mencken

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

H. L. Mencken

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

H. L. Mencken

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

H. L. Mencken

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

H. L. Mencken

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

H. L. Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

H. L. Mencken

Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

H. L. Mencken

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

H. L. Mencken

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

H. L. Mencken

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

H. L. Mencken

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

H. L. Mencken

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

H. L. Mencken

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

H. L. Mencken

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

H. L. Mencken