The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... It takes a special… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share
